DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2012/01/30

Liquid Light

Filed under: Body Art,My Past Events — Tags: , , — fred @ 23:06
 

Flowcoat, 1997, with Sue Doe, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In the ’90’s I was known for a blacklight body painting act I developed with a dancer and performance artist called Sue Doe.  It was a sort of Pollockian erotic ritual of pouring, smearing, hurling, and squirting fluorescent paints.  Glowing colors would drip over contrasting hues in an ever-changing visual explosion, choreographed to music.  Our performance was featured on HBO’s magazine show “Real Sex“, as part of a segment about the neo-burlesque Blue Angel Cabaret of New York.  Occasionally I still run into people who remember seeing us on TV.  Click here to see excerpts from a version of this performance we did at one of my art openings.

So we got a bit of low-level fame out of our act, but it was a little too wild and messy for the mainstream stage and we never made much money from it.  Eventually Sue moved out of town.  For several years I was known as the blacklight body paint guy and got gigs at parties, nightclubs, and promotional events, painting models or painting on the people attending the party, before I too tired of the nightclub life – dealing with drunks and taking the Subway home at 3:00 in the morning deafened and crusted in paint.  This post is a look back at some of the photos that survive from that episode of my career.  Some of the painting was done in challenging conditions, but I’ve refrained from retouching the pictures to make the painting look slicker than it did in reality.  In no particular order, here we go:

Vortex, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Not all my blacklight body art was of the splash and smear variety.  Often my painting was inspired by my intuitive sense of energy patterns within the body.  In this approach, I have no preconceived design, but just let the brush follow the form and the feel.  The result is a spontaneous image of the body electric.

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Mamma, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

A blacklight is a light source that emits mostly wavelengths too short for the human eye to see.  It’s like a visual dog whistle – the frequency is outside our range.  You might see a dull violet glow, but otherwise it’s pretty dark.  Fluorescent pigments, the kind used in blacklight paints, are made from naturally occurring minerals that have a special property: when stimulated by light of any wavelength, they emit light of their own characteristic wavelength.  Returning to our audio metaphor, imagine the dog whistle causing a string to vibrate a note lower down on the scale.

Fluorescent blacklight-activated pigments are also commonly known as DayGlo colors (actually a brand name), since even in daylight they glow in their own hues more brightly than any ordinary reflective material could.  Under powerful blacklights, the paint is as bright as neon.

Poesia, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Blacklights and Dayglo paints became very popular in the psychedelic ’60’s, and the effects tend to evoke memories of acid-rock discotheques, scary carnival rides, and vintage science fiction.

Brain, 2010, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Priestess of Horus, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

The paints behave quite differently than regular paints.  The range of colors is limited, and there’s no white.  Whatever doesn’t fluoresce, including bare skin, becomes a dark background for the paint.

The image below, and two others later in this post, are from an event with performance artist Amy Shapiro, from Neke Carson’s performance series in the back room at the Gershwin Hotel.

Amazon, 2002, with Amy Shapiro, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here’s an odd effect, below.  The sensor on this early digital camera was actually sensitive to light in the blacklight range, but the lens focused those wavelengths on a different plane than the visible light.  Thus the paint appears in focus, while the face underlying it appears out of focus.  I find that a beautiful accident.

Mask, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Tetrapod, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Authentic Person, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

For the slathering performances I used cheap poster paint.  It looks great but dries crusty.  Cosmetic body paint is a lot more comfortable to wear on the skin.  Even in the cosmetic paint, the fluorescent pigments tend to be a bit clumpy.  I tried to make the most of this peculiar texture in the painting.

Scarab, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Under mixed lighting, the paint still glows effectively as long as the visible light doesn’t completely overwhelm the blacklight, though the black background effect on the skin is lost.

Channel, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Orange is probably the most intense of all the fluorescent colors.  It looks positively fiery.

Flame Tree, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Below, an unpainted strip up the spine creates a dark shape.  The dancer’s sinuous moves turn this negative space into a snaky object moving against a bright background.

Governing Vessel, 2002, with Amy Shapiro, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Couple, 2003, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

A camera light meter is useless in figuring out the proper exposure for blacklight effects.  In the film photography era, you pretty much had to take a guess.  The photo below, taken during a performance, is a long enough exposure to give motion blur.

Gesture, 1998, bodypainting performance by Sue Doe and Fred Hatt, photographer unknown

The painting here almost obliterates the surface texture of the body.  It looks like a black velvet painting by a hypercaffeinated expresssionist.

Impasto, 2008, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Lightning Crouch, 1998, bodypainting performance by Sue Doe and Fred Hatt, photographer unknown

This one’s a good example of the neon sign effect.

Look Out, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Below, the shape of the lower back of a seated model becomes a kind of vase out of which a phoenix rises.

Phoenix Vessel, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Sometimes I imagine that if we could see hidden dimensions, bodies would look like this for real – bodies of light.

Power Plant, 2002, with Amy Shapiro, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

2011/05/06

The Patterned Body

Filed under: Body Art — Tags: , , — fred @ 23:23

Exoskeleton, 1997, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

The human body is magnificent in its structure but fairly bland in coloration.  It comes in a range of tones that can be roughly approximated by various ratios of coffee to cream.  We admire the spots of the cheetah, the tiling of the giraffe, the patchwork of the calico cat, the bold colors of the mandrill, and the psychedelic riot of tropical birds, fish and lizards.  One thing you can say about human nature is that we can’t just leave things as they are.  We like colorful, so we shall have colorful.  Thus tattooing, body painting and other ways of adding pattern and color to the body are among the earliest and most universal of the arts.

For a long time I’ve been using body paint as a way of exploring the body, its structure and its energy.  This post features paintings that have the approach of patterning the body.  Sometimes, as in the picture above, I simply stylize the underlying anatomical structures.

One of the most basic characteristics of nearly all vertebrate body structures is bilateral symmetry, so the most basic division of the body is its center line.  Below, I’ve made the right half of the body red, and the left half blue.

Bicameral Body, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

The painting below was made for a performance at Spring Studio by dancer Arthur Aviles.  The preparation time was limited, so I simply made a single black line that meandered around the whole body, then painted the area on one side of the body yellow and on the other side blue, with two smaller areas, one on at the heart and another on the head, outlined and filled in in red.  Combined with Arthur’s movement, this simple improvised patterning produced visual shapes in motion that were different from the body structures we’re used to seeing.

Earthman, 1997, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

The four-color map theorem is a proven mathematical idea that “given any separation of a plane into contiguous regions, no more than four colors are required to color the regions so that no two adjacent regions have the same color”.  Patterning the body can be about dividing it into regions of differing colors, a “body map”.  The body map above is essentially just two regions, a yellow and a blue region, each of which has a single red island.  The body map below is divided into a symmetrical pattern of regions using three colors, orange, green, and blue.

Faceted, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In the painting below, there are are shapes of four colors, red, yellow, blue, and white, against a green background or base color.

Ghost Shreds, 2003, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

This kind of basic patterning, by tracing a wandering path over the surface of the body, then dividing it into different color regions, can be elaborated with a few simple additional strokes into a full-fledged abstract composition.

Modern Jazz, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

The shapes and strokes are always determined by the three dimensional contours of the body.  The brush hand is always sensitive to both the energy and the physical structure of the living body that is the ground of the painting.

Lower Extremities, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

The underlying structures of energy and anatomy are so beautiful and so complex that any painting can only capture a very simplified response to this rich source material.

Ankh, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Serpentine, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

The remaining patterned body paintings in this post are presented with two photos per painting, showing how different poses reveal different aspects of these paintings as body explorations.  This is part of the magic of body painting, that it is made in response to the living energy in the body and is then transformed and brought to life by the movement of that body.

Motley, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Motley, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

The patterns in the painting below are created by placing a hand on the body and painting around the fingers, like how kids are taught to draw a turkey based on a tracing of the hand, but with a more abstract impulse.

Clawmarked, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Clawmarked, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

This painting has a red-orange serpentine shape as its center, with lava-lamp shapes around it in various colors.

Vermilion River Map, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Vermilion River Map, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In the painting below, there’s a white outline form filled in in various soft iridescent tones.

Cloisonné, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Cloisonné, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

This one’s done with fluorescent paints and photographed under blacklight.  The pattern is dense and fragmented.

Neon Creature, 2008, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Neon Creature, 2008, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here’s another swirly patterning in green and blue against a white base, creating a feeling of energy coursing through the body.

Revelry, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Revelry, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

I did the painting and the photography on all the images in this post.  I’ve done no digital retouching to the painting – bodies sweat and move and rub against themselves, so body paint tends to smear, and where that’s happened I have not fixed it.

Previous body painting posts include “Textural Bodypaint“, and “Fire in the Belly“, “Personal Painting“, “Dorsal Emblems“, and portfolios here and here.

2011/02/21

Fan Brush

Filed under: Artists' Tools and Resources,Body Art — Tags: , , , , — fred @ 22:53

Fan Brushes, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

These brushes, with their bristles splayed out in the shape of an unfurled hand fan, are used by both makeup artists and oil painters.  With makeup, they’re often used to blend powders and eyeshadows, or to gently remove fallen eye shadow from the cheeks.  Oil painters generally use them dry, flicking them crosswise across still-workable paint to obscure visible brush marks or to blend tonal transitions to perfect smoothness.  Some also use them to apply paint, especially to simulate textures like hair or grass.  Bob Ross, the happy host of the 1980’s “Joy of Painting” TV shows, was a fan-brush enthusiast, using it for many landscape effects such as trees and clouds.  I always hated his painting style, but Bob Ross probably provided my first exposure to this versatile tool.

I’m not an oil painter and am temperamentally opposed to blending.  I generally use fan brushes not to make things smoother or less brush-strokey, but to make them rougher and more brush-strokey.  I like using them with sumi ink, straight up.

Silvana Dance, 2000, by Fred Hatt

Changing the angle at which the brush contacts the paper makes a thinner or thicker mark.  Applying one edge to the paper gives a thin but bold line.  Turning the brush flat to the paper causes the bristles to spread out and lay down thin parallel strokes over the width of the brush.  These lines are particularly delicate when the brush is fairly dry.  I’ve done a lot of drawing from observations of moving dancers.  The fan brush gives a feeling of movement, and also can fill in shadow areas or create a feeling of the volume of a body with very simple, spontaneous strokes.

Des, 1999, by Fred Hatt

Ground, 2006, by Fred Hatt

Open and Coil, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Ceremony, 2006, by Fred Hatt

The fan brush works this way with any kind of ink, including colored inks.

Invoking, 2006, by Fred Hatt

It’s a very quick way to make cross-contours, giving volume to a line-drawn figure.

Crouch, 2009, by Fred Hatt

For more traditional observational drawing, the fan brush is not an easy tool to master, but I like to challenge myself sometimes.  It’s like trying to eat soup with a fork.  I’m pretty sure both of the sketches below were drawn using the fan brush only.  The edges are drawn with the corner of the brush, and the shading, hair, etc. are done with the flat.

Standing, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Ryan, 2008, by Fred Hatt

I like to use the fan brush with body paint, too.  It can quickly depict flowing textures such as flames or feathers.

Blue Heron, 2004, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

The swirly parallel strokes of the fan brush suggest the energy within the body.

Blue Raynn, 2004, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Fiery Back and Hand, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Fire Heart, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

That last one is a detail of the body painting featured at the top of the post “Fire in the Belly“.  Now that I’ve shown you what to look for, you’ll probably be able to spot the tell-tale stripes of the fan brush elsewhere among my body paintings and ink brush drawings, on this blog or at my portfolio site.

2010/01/15

Textural Bodypaint

Filed under: Body Art — Tags: , , , — fred @ 01:08

Vivid Dust, 2000, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Looking through my personal library this week, I came across an old book called “Design by Accident” by James F. O’Brien.  It’s full of ways to incorporate chance and natural phenomena into visual arts and crafts.  Just the Table of Contents makes me feel inspired, so I’ll share it here:

Tree Forms:  trunks and branches formed by the movement of pigments and liquids

Cracks and crackle:  layers in tension

Crawl:  rejection of paint by an incompatible surface

Drip, Dribble, Drop:  Pollock’s discovery and random patterns

Splash and Run:  designs formed by vigorous impact and gravity

Flow and Swirl:  “marble effect”

Wrinkles and Folds:  folding and bending of surfaces

Flowers:  patterns formed by drops of pigment on a coated surface

Max Ernst’s frottage technique and Pollock’s drips, Rorschach’s psychoanalytic ink blots and Hans Jenny’s Cymatics are among the well-known examples of this kind of thing in recent culture, but scenic painters, fabric artists, faux-finish decorators and craftsmen have always used these methods.  It is impossible to control the outcome tightly, but letting go of such control allows the magic of physics to impart its inimitable majesty.

For much of my own work the human body has been my playground, and I’ve used some of these techniques to create textural effects in body painting.  In this post I’ll share several examples.

Splatter, 1997, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Squeezing paint from squeeze botttles and letting colors run into other colors produces beautiful effects.   In the 1990’s I used to do this kind of body painting as a cabaret act in collaboration with performance artist Sue Doe, using fluorescent paints that glowed under blacklight.  One of our performances at the Blue Angel Cabaret was featured in the HBO series Real Sex episode 25.  I’ll do a whole post about the blacklight performances some day, but for now here’s one image of the squirting technique under blacklight:

Green Snake, 1998, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

And here are the beautiful fluorescent colors running thin as they are cleaned off in the shower:

Rinse, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Handprints have been used since the stone age to make dynamic patterns in paint:

Handprints, 1992, bodypaint by Fred Hatt and Jen S., photo by Fred Hatt

When tempera paint dries, it cracks and flakes off.  The crackled texture adds an air of antiquity to this freeform painting:

Fresco, 1996, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

And here, a coat of paint on the body has been rewetted and worn thin, drying with a marbled effect:

Marbled Belly, 1991, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Sculptors’ clay smeared onto the body dries in a patchy way, depending on local thickness, making fleeting textural patterns:

Wet and Dry, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In this one, clay was applied first for texture, and then paint was applied over the rough, earthy surface:

World Egg, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In this body painting session, done for a cover illustration for Lauren Stauber‘s haunting CD, Solarheart, the first layer was yellow and red paint, with clay applied over it.  The colors subtly bleed through the dusty clay surface.  Dried flower petals are scattered on top of the body:

Petal Strewn, 1998, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here, the model is covered with the dry powdered pigments used in the Hindu spring festival called Holi.  In the festival, which is celebrated in many places in India, and here in New York in Richmond Hill, Queens, celebrants plaster each other with hurled vividly colored powders and liquid colors.

Holi, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here, powdered pigments and bronze powder are used on the body, blended with massage oil:

Jeweled, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here, the front of the body is painted with oil and powdered pigments, and the back with clay and red paint:

Agate, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In this one, the first layer is blue paint, with clay applied over that and bronze powder blown across to adhere to the wet areas when the clay is in the patchily dried state as seen in the black and white photo above:

Lapis and Gold, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here’s a combination of the bronze powder with the powdered Holi pigments:

Painted Desert, 2000, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

An important focus of my exploration of body painting is the experience of the person who is painted.  Being painted is often experienced as a bodily transformation, an external experience of the skin that reflects or enables an internal shift of consciousness.  This ritual aspect underlies the importance of body art in shamanic and theatrical performance.  The stark white body paint associated with butoh dance originated with butoh progenitor Tatsumi Hijikata‘s experimentation with using plaster on his dancers’ bodies.  He wished to intensify their movement by making them conscious of the entire expanse of their skin through tightness and discomfort.  Oil, clay, powders and cracked tempera on the skin are tactile sensations that may be experienced as being one with earth or finding one’s wild animal nature.

Animal, 1997, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

I’ll close with a dyptich of textural legs.  In the upper image the paint is done not by the scattering or dripping methods used in many of the pictures above, but by tracing the blood vessels visible through the skin.  The legs in the lower image are painted with blue powder over oil:

Vessels, 2007, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Gateway, 2006, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Other body painting, most of it more painterly in approach, can be seen on my portfolio site, or on other posts on this blog under the category “Body Art“.

2009/09/05

Personal Painting

Filed under: Body Art — Tags: , , — fred @ 21:42
Victory Back, 2009, body paint and photo by Fred Hatt

Victory Back, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Back in July I posted some of the body painting with woad, or indigo, that I did that month at the Sirius Rising festival at Brushwood Folklore Center in Sherman, New York.  This post will feature selections of my work with regular cosmetic body paints from this year’s festival.

At Sirius Rising, and sometimes at other festivals, I teach workshops and will paint on anyone who will offer their body to my brush, charging no fees but accepting donations.

As I am not a naturally outgoing person, this works well as a way to get to know people.  They approach me because they appreciate my artwork.  When someone undresses and allows me to paint on their body, the barriers that might otherwise divide us are down.

I think of it as a mutual gift:  I get to enjoy the pleasure of painting and the pleasure of physical contact, while the person I paint gets to experience the visual manifestation of their own inner essence that I draw upon in the act of painting on their body.  Then, of course, they get the experience of being noticed and admired by others, and a few of those others may approach me to be painted themselves.

In doing this work, I try to see each person’s own particular beauty, to honor their spirit and enhance their presence.  The paintings above and below are the back and front of someone who just survived a bout with cancer.  I see the painting as representing the victory dance of her life force.

Victory front, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Victory Front, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Next, two paintings made on another woman’s back on two different days, a flower of potential and a bird of aspiration:

Flora, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Flora, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Upward, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Upward, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

People at pagan festivals love nature imagery.  A green moth:

Green Moth, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Green Moth, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

A tree goddess:

Dryad, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Dryad, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

A traditional green man:

Green Man, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Green Man, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

A fiery breast:

Flames, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Flames, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

The young man below, Mihael, wrote about his experience being painted on his Facebook page.  A friend of his took this picture with Mihael’s camera:

Fred Hatt painting Mihael, 2009

Fred Hatt painting Mihael, 2009

Mihael writes, “The brush tickled at times and sent goose bumps all over my body. . . It only took about 30-45 minutes for him to create this work. . . Fred said this was the perfect image for me.  He took all the energy I had within me to make this a great creation.”

Phoenix, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Phoenix, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Mihael continues, “I had already started to burn before the image was complete. . . I spent all day without a shirt and now my cancer is in the shape of a phoenix. . . After the paint had been washed away, a negative of the work was still as impressive as the final painting.  I couldn’t believe how many people commented on it as well as my sunburn which I’m still suffering from.”

Phoenix Burn, 2009, afterimage of bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Phoenix Burn, 2009, afterimage of bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

That must have been a bit painful.  I would certainly recommend using sunscreen before being painted and walking around in the sun all day.  This was Mihael’s first visit to this kind of festival, and I think the burn served as a kind of initiation for him.  There is certainly something appropriate about the image of a bird that rises from fire imprinted in the form of a burn.

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