Left: my tracing. Right: Christiaan Tonnis, Female Warrior #14 “Extinction”, pencil and colored pencil on paper, 1981 — CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Two tracings so far from Christiaan Tonnis’s Female Warrior series — different pieces, different years, both pulling at something different in the line.
Extinction · Cutting Edge of Will
This is Female Warrior #14, “Extinction,” by Tonnis. I think he actually may have put it into Creative Commons — Wikimedia says as much about the image. It’s an incredible piece, genuinely one of my favorites.
This one’s face is so beautiful and perfect. The red line — the stroke running from the brush down to her forehead — is precise and so painful. Perfect. I’m reminded of her even walking around different places today.
I didn’t know how I was going to be able to draw this. So much of it has to do with this almost shadeless quality, the air around the figure, the eyelashes.
It’s amazing how the arm of the inside girl connects to — has something to do with — the neck of the other girl, the main girl. There are these little features, and the expression too. I didn’t know how I was going to do all of it, plus the lines of the turban, so I decided to just suggest it rather than fully render it.
For this one I dug out my colored Micron pens. This whole thing is intense — so much going on. He fully draws the hand itself, which is interesting on its own — the fingers are just gorgeous, so perfectly done. He works on so many levels — he even put in the fingernails. Fingernails have a special status, I think, because they orient the hand.
Since I had my colors out, I thought about using blue for the inside girl — I’ll do that next. She’s at an angle, she faintly emerges, and then the dress.
I added a little contour to hold the turban together. He’s using shading inside the other woman too — I put her hands at the bottom of the cheek, which is kind of interesting.
Her expression is symbolic, funny, kind of off — the whole piece is piercing.
It seems like I want to take this, scan it, and add to it again. Maybe next time I’ll try a version with more color. I just love this piece.
Left: my tracing. Right: Christiaan Tonnis, Female Warrior #17 “Cutting Edge of Will”, graphite pencil on paper, 1992 — CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Another female warrior — Cutting Edge of Will. I find the shape next to the lips so intriguing. I’ve been looking for an inner image here, like in Extinction, and I haven’t found one — though I suspect there is one. The longer I look at it, the more I notice: the black fluid running alongside the nose, which I only realized was fluid once I saw the shape it takes crossing past her lips. The possible body of water at the bottom. The noisiness of the lines above her head. There are subtle blocks, like pieces of tape, in pairs at the center. The walls behind her could be a prison, or a mental hospital — though his title talks about will.
This one has a lot of scribbles on it — holding lines, covering the face, and it’s hard to tell which lines are which. It’s an implied line, even down to the jaw.
I just absolutely love her mysterious eyelashes — could they even be people? He’s got these remarkable shapes along the nose. There’s a hand again, perfect, with fingernails, little blocks; I drew the hand next, it was so hard to see.
Perhaps it’s a kind of hatching, but I noticed that around the eyes, it’s less scribbled — that’s where I started, afterwards hesitantly adding the eyelashes in blue this time.
There’s similarity between the two faces, in the eyelashes especially, and some link in the environment around them — I don’t want to force connection. On their own, these faces are simple, maybe even transcendent, like a Jungian archetype. They don’t look like warriors to me, not in the face — but the red, the blue, and the haze around them say otherwise. Maybe they’re warriors on a different plane.
Strangely, before I scanned these I thought neither one had turned out well. Then I saw them in the diptych, next to his, and I like them now. For Extinction, though, I think it’d be interesting to try the inner woman again in a different color sometime.
Image credits & sources. Christiaan Tonnis is the copyright holder for both pieces and self-published them to his own Flickr feed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0; Wikimedia’s FlickreviewR bot verified each license before mirroring to Commons — Extinction on 18 March 2010, Cutting Edge of Will on 21 June 2020. This isn’t a public-domain claim, it’s the artist’s own choice to release the work this way. Because both sources are CC BY-SA 2.0, the tracings/diptychs in this post are offered under the same license: CC BY-SA 2.0, adapted from Christiaan Tonnis, Female Warrior #14 “Extinction” (1981) and Female Warrior #17 “Cutting Edge of Will” (1992). (I saw that Christiaan had commented on Flickr: a woman named Alisha had used #17 on her mental health blog, and credited him for it. He thanked her, calling her article touching and true.)
Links
- Female Warrior #14 “Extinction” — Wikimedia Commons — file page, license, source
- Female Warrior #14 on Flickr — original upload
- Female Warrior #17 “Cutting Edge of Will” — Wikimedia Commons — file page, license, source
- Female Warrior #17 on Flickr — original upload
- Christiaan Tonnis — Wikimedia Commons artist page