the uneducated eye. i have my ideas about the uneducated eye. it sees a painting of a mountain and understands that its one persons version of what a mountain looks like and is able to suspend disbelief like people do with movies and then all these little things about the drawing that dont contribute lets say to the likeness become this sort of friction, this captivating, stimulating friction, like some dissonance. but, if this viewer has a really educated eye, he sees the drawing  and all the parts of it that are not likeness function as plot holes. they don't make the drawing interesting, they make it just a drawing. some shmuts on a piece of paper. the uneducated eye enjoys the drawing like a child enjoys movies where he doesnt think about it as a story made with moving pictures. he might intellectualy grasp that the movie is fake, but sensually he experiences it as though it were real.

Is it the person behind it. Is it the thing being represented. Is it the accuracy. Is it the scintillation, the dissonance. Is it relating. is it novelty. Is it raw nature. Is it pure consciousness . These are questions. Can these questions be considered without throwing away the most important thing of all.

certain things about peoples faces and expressions have had certain effects upon me, i have found. i would bet im not alone in this. i'll have certain feelings about a person that will be driven by certain things about their face and the way they use it. i can think of a couple examples. a big obvious one is pretty girls. but it doesnt really intimidate me like it did before because i've examined it so much. i mean what im getting at is there's a million of these types of things, here's another one. i get a certain feeling when i look at someone who has big heavy eyelids. some peoples faces have a friendly quality to it like with a smiley mouth and droopy or arched eyes. some people have a built in stand offish or grouchy looking face. but if as an artist i feel the face having some effect on me, i can examine like a detective. i can try to get to the bottom of what is giving me some feeling, and draw it, or i can allow myself and my actions to be regulated by those shapes. or heck maybe a little bit of both.

when people think of what they look like

when people think of "what they look like" I think most of them break their face up into two parts. theres the part that is their essential likeness, and the other part could be thought of as "flaws." they dont see the weird things as being parts of their actual likeness but rather group the "weird things" in the same place as they would put acne, drool, hairstyle. If these parts were gotten rid of, their actual face would still be there, unchanged. But when we look at others, particularly those we havent met or arent close to, we see it all. Whats there is there. We use all the information to distinguish this person from other people. But the person whos face it is has some relatively small set of people that they take into account. And their own face has only to be distinguished from amongst all these people that they know or see often enough. But a caricature or portrait artist doesn't know how big this set is, so even if he is only to convince this one individual that he is depicting them, he has to be as specific as possible, and ignore no grotesque detail. So in this light one can see going generic as more of an empty gesture. The artist's responsibility is to entertain while with this infinite handicap, the necessity for likeness, and yet the responsibility stands. Having never drawn nor even seen this, the shape of what is now sitting before him. To the craftsman, to the workman, to those whos skill is acquired through practice and habit and repetition, the feat of capturing likeness can then be only seen as impossible, but to the observer, the passer through, the seer, its as simple as seeing, because the most garish and unusual thing before you is all youre required to draw.

the perception might be that caricature artists know what all the features of the face are and then when they see people, they are attuned to which dimensions stand out as being unusual and they are able to point these idiosyncratic proportions out in their drawing by exaggerating how far --at least several of the more notably prodigal dimensions have been offset by the hand of god or nature,  but the truth is that those dimensions--those proportions themselves become features to the artist over time. a beginning caricature artist will set out with some knowledge of common features and proportions and then examine faces in much the way that most would think. they effectively classify all of the major features and "exaggerate" the idiosyncrasies. the idiosyncrasies being aspects of a given face which lie outside of all of the artist's normal facial feature types.  so then if someone's nose is too big to fit the mold so to speak, the artist makes the nose size bigger because that's the one thing that disqualified it from conforming to the set. but eventually when the same deviations keep popping up repeatedly, they become features in and of themselves.

the old paradigm was that novels and paintings and music were wonders. they were magical. they were spiritual in a way. but the new paradigm is that this is what's possible. this is what you can do. its within your capacity because there's no such thing as magic. mozart is just a guy. but then whats the point of even doing it if it isnt magic. it could be the domain of the magical shifts. or is shifting. 

Hiccup Cure

Hiccup cure:  Sit up straight, hold your breath and stick your pinky in your bellybutton.