I did this drawing today, and erased out some quick highlights from a photoshop layer. I love the asymmetrical nature of Lincoln’s face. His face seems to bare the burdens of a man that, according to William Herndon, “God rolled through his fiery furnace.”
Edwin Markham penned these words for the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922:
The color of the ground was in him, the red earth,
The smack and tang of elemental things.
Sprung from the West,
He drank the valorous youth of a new world,
The strength of virgin forest braced his mind,
The hush of spacious prairies still his soul.
His words were oaks in acorns;
And his thoughts
Were roots that firmly gripped the granite truth.
