Do Souls Multiply

Mishka Zigonoff, pen, 2026  Thousands and thousands of portraits I've drawn and painted with always the same objective; to capture the likeness of the one portrayed. People have told me that in the best of portraits something more is depicted, call it the soul. I've come to doubt this. What's left beyond a physiognomy is my insecurity (from a self-assured vantage point there's never even a beyond).   Mishka Ziganoff here, was drawn sixteen years after I drew him in the context of The Top 100 2010 , an annual illustrated list of 100 songs. The text to go along the image was titled, as it is here, Physiognomy. The image below is one six similar portraits on colored post-it papers from 2010. The following text comes from the post linked to above, slightly edited. The photo of Mishka Ziganoff, apparently the only one in existence, appears on Google Images either cropped at the top or cropped at the bottom, none showed the full photo. The character of Ziganoff in the ima...

The image here is one half of a painting from 2021, meant to illustrate a sound recording of the Shuar people from 1963, Ecuador. While painting the portrait the woman continued to bear a striking likeness to a friend of mine from back in the Netherlands. To this day, the painting contains the spirit of Marja, living far removed from the Shuar. Every twentieth or so portrait painting or drawing feels like a painting of someone other, someone known enters into consciousness. After deliberations of the stats of world populations and imprecise estimates of how many people one meets in a lifetime, some flaky use of statistics, and cruddy math, the conclusion was reached that there are about 400,000 different souls in the world. A novel explanation of the mystery of reincarnation. How is it possible so many more people are alive today than, say, one thousand years ago? In other words: Do souls multiply? There are no answers here. Questions merely lead into other questions...