Fifth day in the countdown for November 22.

Friday: Legs of John F. Kennedy.

I really don't know what to tell you about JFK's legs, except : Look at the photo to the right. This is why I don't add a drawing today, because I am simply not able to draw *these* legs in an accurate way. I tried, but failed. Poor talentless me.

It's funny hearing men praising "long legs" on women, because long legs are more typically a male attribute. Men have long legs, not women. As I said - just look at the photo.
My mom don't really like that picture. As a  veteran of the Woman' right Combat, she thinks that the whole pose is pretty macho: Him sitting on a far better chair and Jacqueline sitting behind and beyond him. I usually answer that she has the best place one could have in this universe, because her hand is right at his ass. Hey! Whaddaya expect more?
Jacqueline actually was a modern woman, more than any First Lady before her - but she also knew what her people expected from her function. I  think that the submissive pose is less due to the fact that he was the man, but more to the one that he was the president.
JFK himself was very open but he also took a lot of care to keep a permanent distance between him and the rest of the world. When becoming president, he insisted that even his closest friends had to call him "Mr. President". This is one of his typical dualities: One side of him was fellow-like, with baths in the masses, allowing petting and hand-shaking. The other side was more distant and dignified than most other presidents, admitting no one to be on the same level as himself.
Back to the legs...I really do not know what to tell more about them. Except that they are breathtaking. A pain in the ass to draw, an eternal challenge, source of joy and despair.

Tomorrow: JFK's feet.

Front and rear

Fourth day in the countdown for November 22.

Tuesday: Waist and beyond of John F. Kennedy

We come to the body part that is mostly of special interest. For any artist with any muse ;-)  This entry will be difficult to keep decent.
Going down to JFK's Waistline, we can merely guess what's beyond his clothes. I have some photos showing hin im wet bathing shorts glued tightly to his body, revealing the shape of his behind. His cheeks certainly were well-built, neither too flat, neither too big, just right. Or in more simple words: He had a nice ass!
The front part is harder to guess. There are some obscure witnessing from people who claim to have slept with him. The description of his parts vary widely and seem to depend on wether or not the person left JFK in good terms.
The level of truth of these reports must be considered with a lot of care. As a biographer once said: "If all these stories are true, JFK spent more time having sex than he had days in his life."
What we do know is that he was circumcised at the age of 21. He obviously hated it and called the Mayo Clinic, where it was done, the "dirtiest hole on earth".

Still looking at the wet-shorts photos, especially when looking at them long enough, it suddenly seems possible to sort the folds into what's just fold and what's... well, you know. Maybe it's just my imagination. However. According to the impression received this way, I have reasons to assume that his intimate parts were as well proportionated as the rest of the body.
I drew him naked a lot of time in my stories. Even full frontal.  All while I have become more and more skeptic about the depiction of violence, I still believe that the rendering of natural nudity is nothing wrong or bad.

Tomorrow: JFK's legs

Chest

Third day in the countdown for November 22.

Wednesday: John F. Kennedy's Chest

After his hair and his face, we are inevitably go down to the parts of the body that are usually covered with clothing most of the time. Still we have Photos of JFK in bathing shorts or just bare chest, so we know how he looked there.

JFK's chest was as well proportionated as the rest of his body. He lived in a time when a man wasn't asked to go to the gym in order to get over-muscled and therefore being seen as "handsome", "healthy" or whatever. His son, JFK jr. had a lot more the kind of "beach"-body later, typically required in the eighties and nineties for menfolk. So there is a nice comparison between the generations. Useless to say that I prefer the older one. To my feeling, steely arm-muscles, where the veins look trough the skin like kind of worms, are all but sexy.

Of course, JFK had chest-hair, a thing that is more and more seen as unsuitable or even gross, today. One can often read that chest hair and pubal hair were "at the fashion in the sixties". This is nonsense. People back then just were as they were, and simply nobody thought of doing some shaving on these body areas.  Therefore you can't hardly speak of a fashion, since a fashion would reqire some active practice. Today's practice of full-body shaving actually IS the fashion. A fashion that probably would have alienated the people in the sixties, including JFK.

I am not really into too much chest-hair, but JFK's is just fine, since it is limited on a pretty triangle, leaving the rest of the chest clean. Nice and easy to draw. Because drawing body hair is always a bit tricky. In most of the time, it lets the figure look "dirty". This is due to the fact that in proportion, the hair would be much thinner than the finest pencil line.

JFK's arms were not too, but pretty long and his hands rather big. His fingers were bony and definitely not frail. Only the size of the hand prevented them to look gross like the paws of a lumber-jack.

Tomorrow: JFK's Waist, Hips and butt.  (I know you ALL gonna read this one ;-) )

Face of Beauty

Second day in the countdown for november 22.

Tuesday: Face of John F. Kennedy

I am repeating myself when I say that to me, JFK's biggest mystery has always been the fact that he is beautiful – without being it. Especially his « hanging » eyes with the over-developed lower eyelids certainly do not match the classical criteria for « beauty ».

Even tough, he is considered good looking by a majority of people. A huge challenge, especially for an artist. How can I render his beauty ...all while drawing the eyes?

Some time ago, I decided to solve the mystery by the means of « science ». I carefully measured his face and discovered that it has perfect proportions, meaning that every lenght, thickness and so on keeps repeating in other parts of his face. Measuring other faces made it obvious that he has more of these harmonies than a majority of the people, including his wife Jacqueline.

This explains why one has to avoid even the slightest error when drawing him – the proportions can not differ as much as a millimeter - or the result will be simply, "not him".

This is very difficult and probably the reason why most of the JFK-portraits I know are not good. Not really. I don't exclude myself from this poor rate: To my feeling, only one out of 100 from my JFK drawings are halfway accurate. This gives me headaches, sometimes.

I have a photo of him where some Idiot tought it was a good idea to « overpaint » his "eye-rings" (the lower eyelids). On the contrary to what the idiot probably wanted, JFK doesn't look good this way. His face is just boring, like some kind of shallow dressman. The "rings" are needed to render his beauty. HIS kind of beauty.

That leads us to the everlasting but so seldom respected conclusion, that beauty is indeed individual. There may be some basic criteria, like  proportions in harmony, but there is also something in addition to that.

Let's talk a bit more about the eyes. In addition to their form and their underlying « charms », they were particular big. But this can only be seen on photos where he is in a darkened room. He was very vulnerable when it comes to bright sunlight and squinted his eyes most of the times, when he was outside. 

The above photos show the phenomenon very well.

Of course, we all may have that kind of reflex, but it was strongly developed on JFK. You will barely find a photo of him in normal light showing him with the eyes open like on the sepia photo at the right. As I already mentioned in another post, his eyes were not blue as most of the people think, but seaweed-green.

As for the nose and chin, they have both the particularity that they are just enough developed  to make him look manly, but still so much refined and gracile to give him the all over willowy look. Mouth and lips are drawn in perfection, without the slightest irregularity.

It's an old artistic tradition to draw people handsomer than they are. Idealising is the word.  With JFK, this doesn't work, because reality will always be better than any artwork. Or am I idealising right now? I think, all artists feel this way when talking about their muses. Maybe this actually is the very true nature of a muse.

Tomorrow: JFK's chest and arms