No Mirrors for Me

Please click on these pics to enlarge them.


Some artists always draw from the mirror, and it would seem to become a permanent habit with them. No matter who they draw, what the gender, the face always looks, pretty much, their own. I suppose it is all just the same formula they regurgitate, each time, over and over again, as a matter of habit-energy. This is not to say that such art does not have value, but it's just not what I want to do. Jean Cocteau, for example, used often to be drawing his own face, and the male figures he draws all look pretty much alike, but his work has its own charm. Some commercial artists tend to draw every human face the same, and one suspects they don't know how to do otherwise. I can't think of anything more boring than working from the mirror, all the time, when there are so many other interesting things and people to draw. I shouldn't like, either, to project my own likeness onto a portrait that's supposed to be of another person.

I notice, in the cartoon scribbles, above, that I used pretty much the same symbols for nose and ears. Who are these people I have drawn? Do you know them?