I feel obligated to render a cowboy hat. Florida isn’t really much of a southern state, but anything within 100 miles of the northern border is basically Alabama or Georgia. That distinct, humid, pine-wood transition zone where Florida blurs into Alabama and Georgia has a very specific kind of weight to it. South Florida belongs to palms and salt. North Florida smells of pine sap, red clay, diesel, and wet heat. Somewhere before the state line, the map quietly changes its accent. The panhandle is a territorial mix of old time Floridians. The beaches there were once known as the Alabama coast. It’s still popular to go over the state line to go to the “Alabama Beach”. My hand knows which way it wants to go. Something low and loose plays in my mind, scraping against the state line. A soft, pulsing synthesizer undercurrent, mimicking a humid evening.
He’s wearing the dust of a forgotten coast
A cowboy hat tilted against the glare
I tried to sketch the grit, but gave a ghost
A little too much shadow in his stare
Every drawing seems to invent its own soundtrack. This one hums in faded analog tones, somewhere between a porch swing and a cassette left too long on a dashboard. I am trying once more to understand the delicate balance of presence and emotion in a man’s body. I fail at the simple glance of manhood. It seems to me that sometimes masculinity and weariness are best conveyed in the heavy drop of a shoulder or the way someone occupies space when they think no one is looking.
An attempt to make him look dour has only made it appear he’s wearing makeup. The sharp lines turned to eyeliner under a heavy brow. The digital line is too crisp, too deliberate; it mimics the sharp contour of eyeliner rather than the soft, smoky smudge of a humid twilight. Every time I try to deepen the hollows beneath his eyes or define the downward set of his mouth, the screen betrays the intent. It lacks the grit of the clay outside. I want the shadow under his hat to look like a noon-day shelter, not a cosmetic choice. I am fighting a machine that wants everything clean, when all I want is dirt. Pish. I need a new pen tip.
I’ll just be happy that emotion is conveyed and fret less on the nature of the man’s life. Perhaps he’s quite comfortable in himself and doesn’t care what anyone thinks. If the emotion arrives before the anatomy, perhaps I’ve drawn the important thing first. The bone structure can be wrong. The perspective of the brim can wobble. But if the slouch feels heavy enough to pull at the viewer’s own spine, the physics don’t matter. You can’t measure a mood with a ruler. If he looks like he’s spent forty years listening to the pine trees grow along Highway 95, then the pen has done its job, regardless of where the collarbone lands.
Attempts have been made and pencils have been broken. If the broken pencils and worn-down tips have at least managed to leave a piece of genuine emotion on the page, then the study isn’t a failure at all. The pencils broke before the feeling did. If even a fragment of that feeling reached the page, the drawing has already succeeded.
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