Gaze Angle, 2009, by Fred Hatt
This is one of my big black drawings, made about three weeks ago. It’s 48″ x 60″, or 122 cm x 152 cm, aquarelle crayon on black paper cut from a large roll. Excepting a little finishing work, this drawing was completed in one three hour session working from life with model Jessi. I made some small warm-up drawings in a sketchbook at the beginning of our session, but didn’t directly use any of those in putting together the big piece. There was no pre-planned composition. I worked on the floor, sometimes crawling on top of the drawing, looking at my model on the other side of the studio. All the overlapping figures are different poses of the same model.
I’ve made a number of these big drawings. Sometimes they really work, and sometimes they fail, but when they do work the compositions have a vigor and a naturalness that I’ve never been able to achieve by deliberate design.
For this session, I photographed the work in progress whenever we took a break. The “in progress” photos are a little rough. You’ll see the weighted balls I use to hold the paper down, and in the first one the edge of my crayon box. But they give some idea of how the work proceeds.
Stage 1, overlapping poses:
Gaze Angle, stage 1, 2009, by Fred Hatt
I started out by just asking Jessi to take different short poses of her own choosing for a few minutes at a time. I sketched them with different colors, chosen arbitrarily, so when they overlap it would be possible to distinguish the lines of one figure from another. By the time we took our first break there were five figures, already occupying most of the page. I believe the figures were sketched working around the page in a clockwise direction, starting with the one on the lower right. At this point I needed to stand up and get a sense of what was beginning to develop, and what possibilities remained in the still open spaces. Jessi and I both looked at the piece and talked about what might come next. These works are truly collaborations with the model!
Stage 2, establishing a center:
Gaze Angle, stage 2, 2009, by Fred Hatt
Only two additional figures were added in the second session, a sideways reclining pose in the upper half, and a kneeling figure with face upturned in the center. That pose was selected specifically to fit the open space we noticed at the time of our first break. I had also felt there was something interesting about the different heads facing in different directions. A face looking upwards and another turned away seemed to add balance to this aspect of the composition. I also liked the overlapping of hands and feet at the right center of the piece, and the juxtaposition of the four heads on the far left side with the roundness of shoulders, breast and thigh.
Stage 3, filling gaps:
Gaze Angle, stage 3, 2009, by Fred Hatt
During the third session, a foreshortened reclining figure was added to the largest remaining sparsely drawn area of the page. Then two of the faces flanking that figure were developed. They may have been looking a little lost in the increasing density and needed to be pulled forward. The face just to the right of the center was given bright white eyes looking directly at the viewer of the drawing. I think of that as a hook, a place to stop the eyes when they are swirling around in all the turbulence of the picture. Some very linear body fragments were used to fill the two remaining “holes”.
Stage 4, end of time working with model:
Gaze Angle, stage 4, 2009, by Fred Hatt
At this point we were running out of time. At our last break I had noticed two areas that still felt a little undefined. I’d seen Jessi with her face cradled in her hands, and this image seemed to add a nice bit of crisp detail, seen from two angles and left in a pure linear state, without shading.
Stage 5, finishing touches, days later:
Gaze Angle (final), 2009, by Fred Hatt
After my session with Jessi was over I pinned the drawing up on the wall where I could walk past it and look at it over the next several days. Finally, I made some finishing touches on it. Not too much – It’s very easy to screw up a drawing like this by overworking it. Just some background colors to bring out some parts of the figures that tend to get lost, and to separate and sharpen some of the facets. There are also a few touches like the blue highlighting on the upper left and upper right faces, cross contours to give dimension to the elbow and hand in the upper left corner, and some development in the necks and collarbones near the center.
If you’re interested in other drawings made with this process, check out this gallery on my portfolio site. I don’t know if anyone else works in a similar way – if you know of someone, let me know by leaving a comment.
This style developed out of my interest in capturing movement in drawing, and in working with the tension between order and chaos. I noticed that my quick sketches had a great feeling of energy, but that energy was often diminished as a drawing became more finished. I wanted to keep the spontaneity while increasing the complexity. When hiring models for private work, I was compelled to do everything it was impossible to do in the regular group drawing sessions I attend. I can afford to hire models only occasionally, so I want to get my money’s worth!
For me, this process is about the magic of collaborating with Chaos. I avoid preconceiving either the design or the theme. As I wrote in one of my artist’s statements, “What is expressed in these works is not a concept or a personal feeling, but something unconceived, a spirit that emerges from the moment, from the interaction of artist and model and environment.”
I think I learned a lot from my brother Frank, a musician with a love for improvisation. The key to improvising is to be fully engaged in the moment. These drawings are one of my ways of practicing that vital spiritual discipline.
