Friday Feature-An Artist's Hands

Asalamu Alaikum,

For the longest time I have wanted to have long delicate fingers, smooth unblemished hands. Maybe I read too many romance novels, but always the heroine's hands seem to be described with words like- "delicate", "elegant", "smooth", "porcelain", "fine boned", "tender", "exquisite", and "graceful". In my mind I have this picture of a hand with slender wrists, with long and graceful fingers, the kind I have always imagined artists and piano players to have.

When I look at my hands they don't look anything like the picture I see in my head. My wrist is not slender, my palms are square, and my fingers are on the short and stubby side. When I used to look at my hands I sometimes thought that they were "peasant hands", rough, square palmed, hard and more suited to working in a field all day than creating art.

I love to work with my hands, all the crafts that I do, the sewing, the knitting, everything is still art to me. Sometimes I am following a pattern(usually not though), but even then it is in a way still art. Similar to the way musicians play the notes written, crafters following patterns are just playing their own notes.

I am not sure when my opinion of my hands changed, but somewhere along the line it did. My hands may not have long slender fingers, but they still create things. I wrote a post once about my mental body image, and how it doesn't really match to what I see in the mirror. Not quite the same problem, as my hands haven't magically turned into the idealized image I have of an artist's hands, but my perception of my hands has changed.

Now when I look at my hands I see that they are still square, with stubby fingers, but also that they are strong, capable, beautiful- the hands of an artist.