Pair One pulled some remarkable faces, and after 10 seconds or so of hard work both collapsed on their backs roaring and waited 10 minutes before trying again.
Because once you begin to absorb his drawings, once you fall in love with that beautiful line-work, the shading, the anatomies and those remarkable faces, well, you never really stop.
He smokes and, swearing in conventional Russian, has a remarkable face that is by turns bewitching and soft.
I recently watched The Jinx, a wonderful HBO documentary about alleged murderer Robert Durst, and a huge part of the show's appeal was Durst's remarkable face: hangdog, craggy, and capable of the most bizarre contortions under questioning.
If he had been older, if he hadn't been dark, brown eyes ablaze in that remarkable face; if he had not been so gifted, so young a genius with no time to grow up; if he hadn't grown up, undistinguished, to an obscure old age.
It's exhaustive, and impossible to reduce, but here's how she describes one work by the great Douglas Huebler: "Eight people were photographed at the instant exactly after each had been told: 'you have a beautiful face' or 'you have a very special face,' or 'you have a remarkable face.' Or in one instance, nothing at all".
But Ms. Testud, a rising star in France (Benoît Jacquot's "Sade," Chantal Akerman's "Captive"), fills in the blanks, using every resource of her remarkable face to express the confusion, the longing and the desperation of a young woman faced with an unexpected opportunity to change her life.
These were complex uses of a remarkable face which, with its vulpine lips and teeth and penetrating eyes, lives in the overlit borderland between beauty and ugliness, and thus constitutes a fine battleground for the forces of good and evil competing for Christ's soul.
Forest Whitaker's Amin is vast and dark as Uganda itself, a guffawing, snorting, farting correlative of 'l'Etat, c'est moi'; he basks on the surface of murky depths, one eye in that remarkable face seemingly seeing all while the other droops in dangerous somnolence.
Nevertheless, the most enduringly famous image of Kiki is Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres, a photograph of her naked from behind, her signature bobbed hair hidden in a turban, her remarkable face almost hidden, and her voluptuous body transformed into a musical instrument by the addition of the "f-holes" of a violin.
If he had been older, if he hadn't been dark, brown eyes ablaze in that remarkable face; if he had not been so gifted, so young a genius with no time to grow up; if he hadn't grown up, undistinguished,to an obscure old age.
