DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2011/08/22

Curiosity as Cure

Filed under: Abstract Art,Art and Philosophy — Tags: , , , , — fred @ 15:29

Sound Suit, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Sometimes there’s something I’d like to write about, but I don’t have good visuals to accompany it.  And sometimes I have images I’d like to share, but can’t think of much to say about them.  I’ve always considered the combination of words and pictures to be the essence of Drawing Life as a blog.  Here I’m going to talk about some ideas that are close to the heart of my artist’s philosophy, my intuitive sense of the moment we humans find ourselves in.  I’ll intersperse these ideas with some of my recent doodles.  There’s no direct correspondence between the pictures and the words, except of course that doodling is what I often do while listening to someone drone on and on, and if I’m going to drone on in text, I may as well break up the words with some of my wiggly, loopy lines.

Multitask, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

In 1999-2000, the American Museum of Natural History in New York hosted a temporary exhibit called “Body Art:  Marks of Identity”.  It was a survey of tattooing, piercing, scarification, body painting and other kinds of body modification across many cultures and through history.  My friend Matty Jankowski, a tattoo artist and a collector and scholar of materials and artifacts related to the history of body arts, was one of the consultants to the curators of the exhibit.  Thanks to Matty, a few of my own body painting images were included in a portion of the show devoted to contemporary body art.

Herald Angel, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Matty also worked with the education department of the museum to present some special programs.  One day there was a kind of open house for the public to learn about body art from artists.  There was a henna artist, a tattooist, a piercer, and I was there as a body painter.  There was a slide show, and all of the artists gave brief presentations on their particular crafts.  People attending the workshop were given the opportunity to try out an electric tattoo needle on a honeydew melon.  The henna artist and I had our materials on hand to give temporary body art to anyone who wanted it.

Bug & Oak, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

There were a lot of parents with young kids at the event, and many of them formed an orderly queue at my body painting table.  Most of my previous experience of body painting was with adults, in my own studio or in art galleries or performance settings, but that day I had a long line of little kids, with their parents, waiting their turn.  As I was painting, I heard the parents talking to their kids:  “What do you want?  Just think about what you want and tell the man what you want?  You can get whatever you want.  Do you want a butterfly?  Do you want a dragon?  Decide what you want and the man will paint it for you.”  Kids were presenting their tiny arms and asking me to paint Furbys or Pokemon characters I’d never seen before.  A small minority, maybe one in ten, would show some curiosity, would ask questions about my paints or my experiences painting people, or would say, “Just paint whatever comes to you,” or “Go wild.”

Cornucopia, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Listening to the endless litany of “What do you want?”, I realized that indoctrination into the consumer mindset wasn’t just accomplished through TV commercials and mass marketing campaigns bankrolled by multinational megacorporations.  Parents were actively programming their kids to the idea that everything was about consumer choice and acquisition, about defining desires and having those desires satisfied.  Even such an odd experience as having a strange artist paint on your arm or hand or cheek was reduced to choosing a brand and displaying it.

Sole & Canopy, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Recall that the name of the exhibit was “Body Art:  Marks of Identity.”  The thesis of the curators was that body art was used to mark its wearer as a member of a tribe, to indicate a special cultural role such as warrior or bride.  These children, under the relentless prodding of their parents, were engaging in the modern form of this practice, something the commercial world calls “branding”.  (Of course the term derives from the practice of searing a mark of ownership into the hide of a livestock animal.)  We are encouraged to define ourselves by our choice of symbols, corporate logos, or popular culture.  It is no longer so much about our role in society, but about our status as consumers.

Cretan Goddess, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

The curious minority in my body painting queue hadn’t been steered to see every opportunity as a consumer choice or a branding of their identity.  They saw this as a chance to experience something fresh, to learn something new.

Coral, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

The consumer mindset says “The one who dies with the most toys wins.”  It’s a zero-sum game, a world of winners and losers.  The curious mindset says “We live in a world of inexhaustible wonders.  What will I experience today?”  It is a world of free play, a world of abundance for all.  It is not a zero-sum game because it’s oriented towards experience, not ownership.  One who collects experiences does not deny them to others.

Bicycle, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

We humans are now in the early stages of a great crisis.  The industrial revolution of the past three centuries has allowed the human population to increase tenfold (it has more than doubled just in my lifetime), and has provided to the common person comforts and luxuries once reserved for kings, even luxuries unimagined by kings.  All of this was made possible by fossil fuels – hundreds of millions of years worth of stored energy expended in an explosive orgy – and by an economic system in which constant increase is the only definition of wealth.  For a few centuries it worked, because there were always new natural resources to be discovered, always undeveloped places to develop and unexploited markets to expand into.

Beatrice, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Alas, we are now coming to that inevitable point where the exponential growth curve must become a bell curve, leveling off and sloping back down, if we are to survive.  The earth itself is beginning to assert its limits, to push back against unchecked growth.  Climate change and resource depletion are becoming costly problems that cannot be solved by ever more spending and extraction and ever more complicated technology.  Our economic system, based on lending at interest, needs constant growth, but facing the slowing of real expansion, it is now just blowing bubbles.  The owners of great wealth are trying to hold onto what they have by no longer sharing their bounty with the masses, but this strategy may ultimately fail too, as wealth defined as growth evaporates when growth stops.

Pipe Organ, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Everyone is in denial now, imagining that there is something that will make the material economy grow again.  But we don’t need more growth.  Human population increase needs to slow down.  Expansion in the per capita consumption of energy and natural resources needs to slow down and even begin to contract.  From the standpoint of the capitalist economy, the slowdown of growth is a dire crisis and even a disaster.  From the standpoint of planetary health, the slowdown of growth is an essential correction.

Eye Pop & Face Slap, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

A child’s body grows by leaps and bounds, but when maturity is reached, physical growth slows and stops.  Getting bigger is for childhood, but in adulthood it gives way to spiritual and mental development.  Wisdom, skill and knowledge, the immaterial aspects of the living being, can expand for a lifetime.  Unchecked growth of the organs and tissues in an adult is cancer.

Merkin Raygun, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

There is now widespread agreement that we need to find “sustainable” technologies and ways of life.  Many still seem reluctant to see that a sustainable economy must be a steady-state economy, not one based on constant growth, at least not as regards population and conversion of raw materials into stuff and stuff into trash.

Insect, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

The consumer/industrial economy says profits must get ever bigger.  Every generation must have more material wealth than the one before.  Our stores have become superstores, our houses mansions, our cars trucks, and our bodies obese.

Spaghetti Structure, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Marketing propaganda is so pervasive in our culture that we internalize it.  We base our sense of identity on our consumer choices, and raise our children to be good consumers above all.

Winehouse, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Our highest value is choice.  We associate choice with democracy and the modern way of life.  We have so many choices now we may feel paralyzed by indecision.  Constantly making choices gives us a limited kind of freedom, but it is constrained by the options that are offered to us:  Democrat or Republican, Wal-Mart or Target, paper or plastic.   The more we are focused on these choices the more we can be prevented from imagining what other possibilities are not being put before us.  The more we define ourselves by choices the more we box ourselves into categories the marketers can exploit.

Nutcracker, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

The curious mind is always wide open, finding interest and beauty in whatever it encounters.  It is always engaged with the unknown, asking questions, speculating, wondering.  The curious mind moves through the world on an exploratory path, following beauty and seeking knowledge.  The curious mind tries to maximize flexibility and avoid being boxed in.

Fruit Tree, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Our civilization faces a difficult period as natural limits awaken us from our dream of opulent consumption.  There will be a period of denial, recrimination, rage.  Those of us who have devoted our lives to curiosity and creativity already know there are pleasures deeper and more satisfying than those offered by consumerism.

Secret Language, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Even as we are forced to cut back, to use less energy and less materials, even as extravagant materialism slips out of the grasp of most people, opportunities for learning and experience will remain abundant.  Creative minds that can ask penetrating questions and imagine fresh solutions will be needed by all.  Curiosity and creativity will see us through stormy times.

 

Stealth, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

The doodles that illustrate this post were all made in the last few months.  All are made with Tombow brush markers on letter-sized printer paper.

 

2011/04/28

Rest and Motion

Filed under: Movement Drawing: Cross Pollination Series — Tags: , , , , , — fred @ 22:04

Sultan and Odalisque, 2011, by Fred Hatt

I like to mix it up, combine drawing with physical movement, and try to capture the feeling of movement with my lines.  Valerie Green’s Green Space Studio in the Long Island City section of Queens hosts a monthly event called “Cross Pollination“, where the studio is opened up for artists, musicians and movers to do their own thing, do one of the other things, and generally draw inspiration and energy from each other.  All the drawings in this post were made at that event.

When I first started posting “Cross Pollination” drawings on the blog, I just titled them with numbers.  They were, after all, just fragments of an ongoing practice, little bits of my own restless variations on the theme, passing moments in the ebb and flow of energy at the actual event.  In later posts, it occurred to me that giving these spontaneous sketches titles might make them more interesting, might make people look at them a little differently, or at least notice how remarkably different one piece was from another.  When a piece of drawing is pretty abstract, the mind, which is oriented to clear imagery and narrative understanding, has a hard time getting to grips with it.  A title gives just a smidgen of narrative or description or association, but it makes a difference in our ability to see what’s in the drawing.  Generally, the titles I have bestowed on these drawings have nothing to do with what I was thinking at the time the drawings were made.  They are phrases that came to me when looking at the drawings later.

The picture at the top of this post, for instance, could be seen as a pure abstraction of squiggly and curvy lines.  But the drawing was inspired by watching dancers in motion, so the lines can be seen as human figures.  The figure on the left seems to be furiously dancing with a sword in swirly robes, while the figure to the right displays curvaceous feminine charms.  So why not evoke orientalist fantasies?

Attitudes, 2011, by Fred Hatt

I try to keep a very loose and responsive hand on the brush, feeling contact with the paper through the delicate tension of the bending bristles, and letting the movement of the hand and brush, and the flowing of the ink, capture the variety of stances and qualities of energy projected by the dancers in the room.

Striped Shirt, 2011, by Fred Hatt

All the figures in the drawing above were made while observing Valerie, Green Studio’s proprietor and director.  Her striped shirt and voluminous ponytail are unifying patterns.

The Oblivious Crowd, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The sketch above could easily be read as pure abstraction, but you can see that there are three figures along the bottom, sitting on the ground at the right, crawling at center, and walking hunched over at the left.  Around those figures you can see several taller figures, more energetic, more blurred.  I don’t recall the scenes I was observing while drawing this, but looking at it now I see the lower figures as the tortured movement of a defeated or injured person, while the other figures represent the people that rush past, paying no attention.  It’s a scene you can see nearly any day on the streets of New York.

Sleeping Mountains, 2011, by Fred Hatt

When the dancers are cooling down, they’re a lot easier to draw than when they’re leaping about.  Sometimes, as in the above sketch, I see them as the contours of a landscape.  The one below is much more of a literal figure drawing, a study of dancers’ stretches.

Hang Out and Warm Up, 2011, by Fred Hatt

At other times, as in the drawing below, I forget about representation and just get into the movement of the hand over the paper.  This is treating drawing as dance, an art in motion.  As this piece developed, certain parts of it suggested images to me, watery and sleek and sexual.  That influenced me to bring out those aspects, but I was also trying to keep everything ambiguous, to keep the images from taking over from the energy.

Billowing Shroud, 2011, by Fred Hatt

When the dancers get going, there’s no way to draw the body in the ways we learn in life drawing practice, carefully tracking contours and analyzing weight and observing the angular relationships between points.  But sometimes I try to see how efficiently the calligraphic manipulation of the brush can suggest the momentary bodies I capture in memory.  Some of the figures in the drawing below remind me of the shapes you see when watching a fire, shapes that often resemble dancers and leapers and writhers.

Fire Sprites, 2011, by Fred Hatt

In the drawing below, two standing figures at the center demonstrate attitudes of power and confidence, while figures around them show ways of bodily experiencing our connection to the Earth.

Grounding and Standing Tall, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Here’s a rough sketch of the studio, with an artist sketching in a notebook at left and a flutist playing at right.

The Scene at Green Space, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Here are more down-to-the-ground figures, squatting, crouching, scuttling, or lying on the back letting the limbs strive upwards.

Down on the Floor, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The next drawing was the last one of a session, and it seems to show the dancers solidified into various sculptural attitudes, stony remnants of life.

After the Storm, 2011, by Fred Hatt

All of these drawings are on 18″ x 24″ paper.  Most are drawn with ink and brush, but the sixth, seventh, and tenth drawings were made with marker.

Previous posts featuring drawings made at Cross Pollination events at Green Space Studio: 

Forces in Black and White

Dancing Brush

Cross Pollination at Green Space

2011/03/22

Serious Doodling

Filed under: Abstract Art — Tags: , , , , — fred @ 22:03

Talisman, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

This is a defense of the practice of doodling.  Doodling has a reputation for being aimless, mindless, pointless and devoid of artistic merit.  As I am an incorrigible doodler, I might be seen as defending my own bad habits, although I would never write in defense of gluttony, bibulousness, lechery, or sloth, to all of which I would be obliged to cop, so clearly I am at least granting doodling an exalted tier among the vices.

Loops & Growers, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

The word apparently derives from the German dudeln, meaning to play the bagpipes.  The form dudelkopf was used to mean fool or idiot, and could I think be literally interpreted as “bagpipe-head”, perhaps an early form of our contemporary idiom “airhead”.  “Yankee doodle” was originally the British way of saying “American idiot”.  Doodle in this sense is probably the source of the word “dude“.  Even meaning idiot, the word seems to carry some subtle aura of transcendence.  Spoken with a certain intonation, the word “dude” is an expression of awe, and the indelible character of The Dude in The Big Lebowski has some of the same blessed qualities of the holy fool as Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.   “The Dude abides.”

Ship, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Pictorial marginalia and abstract designs made while other parts of the mind are otherwise engaged have probably always been a part of the human behavioral repertory, but the verb “to doodle” in its contemporary meaning may originate in the 1936 Frank Capra movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, staring Gary Cooper.  The screenplay is written by Robert Riskin in snappy American vernacular poetry.  In the film, Mr. Deeds defines doodling as an activity that facilitates thinking.

Incantation, 2010, doodle by Fred Hatt

When I was in high school the instruction usually seemed to be paced for the slowest students in the class, and I doodled because the activity soothed my boredom and frustration.  I went to a good university where the level and speed of the ideas being presented was considerably higher, enough to keep even my quicksilver mind thoroughly engaged, but by that time my habit of doodling in class was set, and so I generally doodled rather than, or in addition to, taking notes.  This habit did no apparent harm to my learning; in fact, I believe it enhanced it.

Predicament, 2010, doodle by Fred Hatt

New research backs up this conclusion.  Doodling seems to improve recall and help keep the mind focused.  I tend to doodle while doing things that involve sustained listening with minimal visual or kinesthetic involvement: long phone calls, for instance, or listening to “This American Life” on the radio.  Doodling isn’t the only activity that works this way.  Some people like knitting or whittling.  For me, distance driving is a nearly perfect accompaniment to listening.  But doodling adds a creative element that is more satisfying.  It engages the part of the mind that wants to move and see, while not distracting the part of the mind that listens, understands, and cogitates.

Terse, 2010, doodle by Fred Hatt

Texting and web-surfing are genuinely distracting, because they engage not the visual and kinesthetic mind, but the verbal and discursive mind, the part that needs to be kept present during a lecture or meeting or conversation.  Having done both, I can attest that doodling helps focus while Googling dissipates focus.  I think the transition from paper notebooks to electronic notebooks in the classroom is bound to diminish the school experience.

Splat, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Last year I saw a retrospective exhibit of Charles E. Burchfield, a painter close to my own spirit.  The exhibit featured a significant collection of Burchfield’s doodles, often made on telephone memo pads or the score sheets for card games.  I don’t recall seeing such casual doodles being featured in a major art exhibit before that, but they were a revealing part of the collection, showing the artist’s obsessive exploration of the visual motifs he used to express the intangible and ineffable aspects of Nature.

Upthrust, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Since seeing Burchfield’s show, I’ve found my own doodles have become more intense, actually interesting for me to look at after the occasion of their making has passed.  Doodles are a way of making patterns by allowing the hand to move freely in response to subtle impulses.  Thus, doodling is a practice of feeling the movements of the life force and manifesting them in line.

Arbre, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Life force may seem a mystical concept.  On a certain philosophical level, it is the Tao, the mover of all things.  But it can also be understood in its most direct bodily manifestations, as the movement of the breath, the flow of blood, the nerve impulses, the direction of growth, and the response of the organism to move towards certain things and away from others.  All of these are things we can directly feel and express through bodily movement.

Folia, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

A sensitivity to these different qualities of movement, thrusting and bending, rushing and meandering, the ever-changing weather of emotions and the slow and indomitable determination to grow, gives life to the lines.

Clown, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

You don’t need to dedicate your life to art, as I have, to benefit from doodling, or to take doodling more seriously.  Just doodle in your own way, but rather than thinking of it as a compulsive response to extreme boredom, as the pacing of the caged, view it as the movement of the mind making connections.  Sometimes the different parts of the mind are most unified when they are separately engaged.  Above all, choose doodling when it is appropriate.  If you are sitting in a meeting, or listening to a lecture or sermon, or letting someone tell you the story of their life, and if you feel your attention flagging, don’t check your weather widget or BoingBoing – Doodle instead!

Crown, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Most of the doodles shown in this post were made on regular letter-size paper, sometimes folded in half, using Tombow brush-markers.

2010/12/09

Forces in Black and White

Filed under: Movement Drawing: Cross Pollination Series — Tags: , , , , , — fred @ 23:21

Biomass, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Drawing with ink and brush is more like ice skating than it is like walking.  The lack of friction frees the movement to express the bliss of bodily momentum, making great looping explorations of space.  Smaller strokes can zigzag or oscillate.  If you think of the large flowing lines as low frequencies and the small vibrating ones as high frequencies, there’s a kind of musical sense of harmony and timbre going on in these ink brush drawings.

Equus, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Because of my regular practice of life drawing, all the lines I make have the curves of organic forms and the energy of living movement.

Leaping, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Sometimes Asian calligraphy shows this kind of loose, dashing, impulsive stroke.  The drawing above is inspired by looking at people dancing.  The simple brush strokes suggest figures but communicate their energy while only suggesting their form.  The drawing below uses the same simplified strokes but is drawn more slowly and composed more consciously.  Here you can make out many figures and fragments of figures.  Some of the brush strokes may belong to more than one figure.

Community, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Combining the musical abstract approach and the calligraphic figurative approach produces more ambiguous images.  I often like to keep the figurative elements of the drawing from getting too specific.  Something that can be read in more than one way is more evocative.

Leda, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Every vertebrate is a snake at its core.  Sometimes in movement we can experience a hint of that slippery freedom.

Sinuosity, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Smooth and constant motion is inertia, the same as stillness.  We experience movement only through changes in direction or through acceleration or deceleration.  As in every aspect of experience, change is fundamental.

Breast Momentum, 2010, by Fred Hatt

All of these ink drawings were made at GreenSpace in Queens, New York, during their Cross Pollination events, open sessions where the studio is made available for free improvised music, dance and art.  The drawings are infused with the energy of the music I’m hearing or the moving bodies I’m watching, or from my own movement, as I tend to alternate dancing and drawing.  The movment is too quick to allow for the kind of figure drawing I practice regularly in timed sessions with models, so these drawings usually go more abstract.

Black Sun, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The energy flows in from the music and dance, and manifests in the movement of the hand and brush.  Another factor, one that becomes increasingly dominant as the page becomes filled with marks, is an intuitive sense of composition, a feel for dynamic asymmetrical balance in the plane of the drawing, balance of light and heavy, simple and complex.

Irrigation, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The elemental forces of the world are constantly moving and changing.  We move to be a part of the process, and we draw to trace its fleeting passage in a lasting form.  Cycles within cycles, changes upon changes, make a world, a life, a body of work.

Sky God, 2010, by Fred Hatt

All of these drawings are ink on paper, 18″ x 24″.  Other drawings from the Cross Pollination sessions can be seen in these posts:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

2010/10/07

Nudes with Projections

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Process — Tags: , , , , , , , , — fred @ 01:20

Nox, 1996, by Fred Hatt

Some readers have expressed an interest in seeing more of my early figurative drawings, and more of my more “finished” work, so here’s a post drawn from the early years of my intensive practice of life drawing.

In 1996 I had been practicing life drawing regularly at New York’s Spring Studio for two years.  Minerva Durham, the artist and teacher who founded the studio, asked me to be the monitor (overseer, proctor, invigilator) of a regular once-a-week three hour long pose figure drawing class.  I had to show up every week at the same time, whether I felt like it or not, and take responsibility for the smooth operation of the session.  There was no pay, but I got to draw for free.

I had been developing a technique of color drawing with crayons on dark-toned paper, trying to get much of the richness of painting with the speed and spontaneity of drawing.  For me, three hours was a long time, and  my greatest challenge was to sustain the focus for such a protracted period.  (I can hear the oil painters laughing!  The egg tempera painters just sigh disdainfully.)

Creating a satisfying composition within three hours soon proved to provide plenty of diversion for my short attention span.  Of course the study of the human body and how to render its form and expression is the first task, but if you spend the whole time on that you end up with a figure floating in a void.  In reality, the body exists in an environment, with gravity and light and spatial relationships.  The actual setting of the model in the studio, though, is cluttered and distracting.

I really had no interest in placing my models into fake nature, mythological forests or imaginary harems.  A more abstract treatment of the background seemed the most promising approach.

I had been attracted to drawing more than to painting partly because I was interested in the direct expressiveness of the artist’s marks.  In a painting, these marks tend to get blended and obscured, whereas in a drawing they remain more visible.  Of course, now that I was developing my figures over several hours, striving towards an illusion of reality, as my drawings were becoming more polished, the process of the drawing was becoming more obscured.  So it struck me that I could use the background to reveal some of the process of abstract analysis that the artist goes through on the way to even the most photographic rendering.

Web, 1996, by Fred Hatt

I always figure out a pose partly by tracing angular relationships between different parts.  There’s a line from the knee to the shoulder, a line from the left nipple to the navel and another from the nipple to the notch of the collarbone, and on and on.  Every landmark of the figure has an angular relationship to every other landmark.  In the figure above the original markings that were made in constructing the figure were darkened and extended, creating a web of relationships in which the figure is suspended.

Pensée, 1997, by Fred Hatt

That approach proved fruitful.  What began as a study of internal relationships vanished from the drawing of the body as its light, shadow and color was developed, but then reappeared in the space surrounding the body.  The internal structure manifested in its spatial container.

Gem, 1997, by Fred Hatt

Sometimes the lines were more delicately indicated by their points of intersection.

Filament, 1998, by Fred Hatt

I tried to show the body itself as close as possible to what I actually saw, and to use the surrounding space to show its hidden geometry.

Throne, 1998, by Fred Hatt

At times the treatment could be more subtle, suggesting not so much hard geometrical structure, but a field of energy.

Space, 1998, by Fred Hatt

The pose below has a particularly clear simple triangular structure, so the projected lines show the sub-triangles that give it facets.

Pyramid, 1998, by Fred Hatt

The body can be projected in curves rather than straight lines.  Shadows, furniture and objects, and folds of fabric also create a linear environment in which the figure is embedded.

Rings, 1998, by Fred Hatt

Miha, 1998, by Fred Hatt

The figure below was perched symmetrically on a stool.  I didn’t bother to draw the stool, but instead traced a stack of horizontal markers that define the proportions of this pose:  ankles, knees, hipbones, breasts, shoulders, eyes and ears.

Pagoda, 1998, by Fred Hatt

The angles of the figure imply a crystalline structure that defines the person’s energetic being in geometrical terms.

Start, 1998, by Fred Hatt

Every being is an organic manifestation of a web of relationships.

Ombre, 1998, by Fred Hatt

Action is structure.

Bagua, 1998, by Fred Hatt

The engagement of a person with their environment is an organic flow, at least as complex as the internal flow that sustains the life of the individual.

Oeil, 1998, by Fred Hatt

All of these drawings are aquarelle on paper, around 18″ x 24″ or a bit bigger.  More selections of my work from this period can be seen at the portfolio I put online in 2000, as well as in several posts on this blog.

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