Ellen Stewart, 2011, by Fred Hatt
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, one of the world’s great laboratories for cultivating new talent and exploring new directions in the performing arts, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2011. Eric Marciano, an independent filmmaker for whom I have often worked as a videographer, produced some video pieces about the history and future of this great creative hothouse, and he asked me to draw portraits of a few of the key people interviewed or profiled in the clips, and to animate the process of creating the drawings. Eric’s company, American Montage, recently posted the resulting clips to its Vimeo page, so I can share them here with my blog readers. The video is embedded at the bottom of this post (but those who receive the blog by email subscription will have to follow the link to see it on the web).
These drawings could not be done from life, as I always prefer in portrait drawing, but had to be done from photographs, or, in most cases, freeze-frames from video interviews. They also had to be made to fit the wide 16 by 9 aspect ratio used for high-definition video, not the frame I would usually select for a portrait. This means much of the frame would be background, so I’d need to develop background designs for each face. I set up an easel with a camera on a tripod behind it, and as I worked on the drawings I stopped frequently to snap photographs of the work in progress. The photographs were used to make animations of the drawings as they come into being, layer by layer.
In “Faces of Figureworks“, the exhibition featuring self-portraits by fifty artists currently on view (through March 3, 2013) at Brooklyn’s Figureworks Gallery, I’m showing a new self-portrait drawing alongside a similar, but slower, animation of that drawing’s evolvement, displayed on a digital photo frame.
I remember being fascinated as a kid by Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 film Le mystère Picasso, in which the famous artist painted on back-lit glass panels so the development and alteration of the works is recorded as it happens in time. It made me aware of drawing as a time-based artform. While we usually see drawings or paintings only in their finished form, their creation is a process of movement and change. Many of the directions I have explored in my own work, including painting as a performance, and many posts here on Drawing Life, have been my attempts to explore my own process, and to share that process with others.
In this post I’ll share the drawings I made for the La MaMa video, with stills of each drawing in its finished form, and brief introductions of the subjects, and at the bottom of the post I’ll share the animated clip.
So many famous writers, performers, directors, designers, and composers have been associated with La MaMa that a small selection of portraits like this is necessarily a somewhat arbitrary sampling, but one name is essential. La MaMa was the creation and lifelong project of Ellen Stewart, also known as Mama, whose portrait leads this post above. Stewart, a fashion designer, started La MaMa as a performance café in 1961, a supportive place for the burgeoning creative experimentation of 1960’s New York and soon a magnet for artists from all over the world who were drawn to its cross-cultural playground of theatrical magic.
Andrei Serban, 2011, by Fred Hatt
Stage director Andrei Serban is known for innovative approaches to classic texts with enveloping theatrical pageantry.
John Kelly, 2011, by Fred Hatt
Artist, singer and dancer John Kelly transforms his persona to explore the worlds and psyches of Egon Schiele, Joni Mitchell, and Caravaggio, among others.
Peter Brook, 2011, by Fred Hatt
Since the 1950’s, director Peter Brook has been making spectacular, visceral theater and film with an international cast of collaborators.
Elizabeth Swados, 2011, by Fred Hatt
Composer, writer, and director Elizabeth Swados makes exciting music and theater, crossing every boundary of style and genre.
Christopher Tanner, 2011, by Fred Hatt
Visual artist and performer Christopher Tanner approaches everything he does with extravagant maximalism.
Mia Yoo, 2011, by Fred Hatt
Mia Yoo, a former actress in La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company, is Ellen Stewart’s successor, the Artistic Director of La MaMa ETC since Stewart’s death in early 2011.
And here’s the film, courtesy of Eric Marciano and American Montage, Inc. There is a glitch in the first clip, where Peter Brook’s background disappears and reappears at the end, but this should give you a good look at how my drawing process works. I believe the music is an excerpt from an Iggy Pop song. If you don’t see the video here, follow this link.
