I have been studying how to draw and paint human faces over the last several years. I notice I have a need for faces. I need to see a lot of faces every day—see them live and in person, not on a screen. People are wearing masks in public now, and I am staying home a lot, and it interferes with getting my fix of faces.
Still, the eyes are there. In public places, even with their masks on, the eyes of people are still visible, and the eyes alone have enormous expressive power. If you’re a person who avoids eye contact with strangers in ordinary, non-pandemic circumstances, you might want to consider breaking that habit. If you don’t, you will be missing out on signs, signals, and indications of the life of that masked stranger.
In people’s eyes alone you can see curiosity, fear, mirth, anger. It’s a miracle that all of that communication happens because of a small number of muscles around the eyes and eyelids, combined with the viewer’s unstudied, instinctual understanding of the meanings of tiny, nearly imperceptible eye gestures.
Thank goodness that in painting an expressive portrait, I don’t have to capture an emotion only in a person’s eyes, because the subtlety in the language of eyes may be so great that it is beyond my current powers of art.
Because I am staying home more, I have more time with our cats. We have three cats—two males and one female, who asserts her dominance over the other two. Cats’ faces are very different from ours because they have a lot fewer muscles in their faces, even compared to dogs. Cats’ faces are also covered with fur, which can obscure fine muscle movements. Many people find cats to be unemotional or inscrutable. They simply haven’t learned the feline language of ears and tails, and especially the eyes.
In a way, you could say cats are wearing a mask. They have this condition (lack of musculature) that limits expression in the portion of their faces below their eyes.
So I look in cats’ eyes. Over time I have learned to see those same things that I can see in humans’ eyes: curiosity, fear, mirth, anger. Of course, seeing a cat’s eyes is not always easy. Cats also have to trust you, and they have every reason not to, starting with the fact that you are a lot bigger and stronger than they are. If they don’t trust you, they will not look in your direction while they are experiencing strong emotion, and so you won’t see it.
With regard to what this means for getting along in the pandemic, I would almost say that it takes awhile to learn the language of eyes, whether humans’ eyes or cats’ eyes. But today I feel that we generally already know the language. It is unstudied and instinctual. What we really need is time and trust and patience. We need time to undo our habits of avoiding eye contact. We need time to undo our habits of not trusting even the simple gestures of strangers. We need patience to await the immense rewards of trusting and being trusted.
Bryan K. Alexander 
I appreciate your reflections on “facial recognition” in the era of masks. Interesting that my iPhone cannot recognize my face in a mask, although I understand Apple is working on this. I find it interesting and challenging to discern emotions when most of the face is obscured. That means that the eyes become the main portal.
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In one of my favorite movies, “The Wind and the Lion”, there are several scenes of Arabs who are masked below the eyes. Having watched this movie many times, I have always found myself looking to those eyes in various scenes to discern the moods, emotions, or other human feelings that might be conveyed. Knowing the story and the characters it is much easier to know in retrospect what the looks conveyed by the eyes mean.
The other major body parts that become important for “reading” another person in times of masking are the hands. Although both the eyes and the hands reveal much, the hands may have the advantage in their ability for so much freedom of motion. Like most good writing does, your latest here causes one to do further thinking. I enjoy your work, Bryan, whether written or framed.
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Thanks, Earle. Interesting to think about hands in this context. Artists talk about how difficult it is to draw hands. I read an article that said the human brain gets very active when it sees anyone moving their hands around. It is speculated that our brains are finely tuned to help us learn manual skills by seeing how other people use their hands. This would be another case where we know a language–hand movement–without having studied it. And because our brains are so good at reading hands, we find our drawings of hands so imperfect and flawed.
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