Brushwood Archives - DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2013/09/19

The Swerving Dash

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Quick Poses — Tags: ADaPT Festival, Art Modeling, Bellavia, Brushwood, Dance, Figures, Ink Brush, Movement Drawing, Nudes, Process, Sketch, Spring Studio, Technique — fred @ 23:07

Pedro Reaching, 2013, by Fred Hatt

Quick poses are the very essence of life drawing practice. The word “quick” originally means simply “alive” as in the quick of the fingernails or the phrase about judging “the quick and the dead” from the Apostles’ Creed. Abruptness and rapidity are the qualities that exemplify aliveness. So life drawing is quick drawing, and capturing the life force of the subject is done only with speedy, efficient marks. When a model holds a pose for a period of time, the energy and intensity, inevitably, gradually drain from the pose. Capturing the energy depends on immediate response and a complete lack of hesitation or dithering, even in cases where the artist has hours to study the model. In this post I’ll share some recent speedy sketches made sometimes under difficult conditions.

Classical academic drawing techniques, like those taught in Bargue and Gérôme’s Cours de dessin are analytical and methodical. They provide ways to achieve rigorous observation and accurate rendering of objects and figures. These techniques, though, are quite useless in capturing a pose a model can only hold for a brief interval, and they do nothing to teach an artist to work with flow and rhythm to get the feeling of energy and liveliness into the work.

When the drawing has to be quick, I prefer an approach in which the marking is a direct response to the act of perception. A glance of the eyes picks up the curve of an arm, for instance, and within a fraction of a second the hand holding the pen or brush or charcoal is imitating that curve. The eye falls upon the subject and the marker lands upon the page, cascading with a swerving dash that closely follows the swoop of seeing. The resulting sketches are rough and highly approximate in proportion, but they are lively and full of verve.

Magic quick poses 1, 2013, by Fred Hatt

Since May of this year, Minerva Durham, the founder and director of NYC’s 7-days-a-week figure drawing center, Spring Studio, has been holding outdoor life drawing sessions with clothed models in Petrosino Square, just around the corner from the studio, in protest of an art installation area in the park being converted to a corporate-branded bike sharing station. I made these drawings in the park with a great dancer/model called Magic, in a session shown in this video. I think these are one minute poses.

Magic quick poses 2, 2013, by Fred Hatt

It was cold, the wind was blowing the paper, and my pen was running out of ink, but I was trying to capture the energy of Magic’s poses with rapid marks. I tried using a fine-point sharpie (above) and a brush and black gouache paint, without any water to smooth the application (below).

I try to simplify what I see into directions and angles, but always keeping an eye on full shapes, never just lines. I don’t worry about the finished product, just the immediate process of transforming perceptions into marks.

Magic quick poses 3, 2013, by Fred Hatt

In July, at the Sirius Rising festival in Chautauqua County, New York, I attended a life drawing class led by Bellavia, the artist whose sculpture was featured in this recent post. The workshop was held in an open-sided pavilion and, as with the Petrosino Square session, there was a constant struggle to hold the drawing paper flat in the gusty wind.

Snoo quick poses 4, 2013, by Fred Hatt

To encourage the artists to let go of tentativeness and draw boldly, Bellavia had the model do a lot of ten and fifteen second poses, and encouraged the artists to draw with the flat edge, not the point, of the charcoal. Any hesitation at all would make it impossible to draw anything. I practice quick drawing a lot, but usually the quickest poses I draw are one or two minutes. Ten seconds is just a blip in drawing time! Some of the drawings from that session have an almost cubist abstraction.

Snoo quick poses 7, 2013, by Fred Hatt

Last May, the ADaPT (A Dance and Physical Theater) Festival, based in California, came to my neighborhood in Brooklyn, with performances at CPR (Center for Performance Research). Festival director, dancer and artist Misa Kelly asked me to help organize a life drawing session in the performance space preceding the dance performances, an event described in this blog post. The models were Misa and Nushka. Since we were working in the very large performing space at the center, I took the opportunity to work in a large scale. I had five sheets of 38″ x 50″ (97 x 132 cm) paper, using one for each 20-30 minute drawing segment, drawing flat on the floor with brushes and sumi ink. I planned the session in correspondence with Misa and monitored (supervised and timed) the session, with a selection of invited artists drawing.

The first set was ten one-minute poses, three three-minute poses and one five minute pose. Of course when there are two models and you try to draw both of them, one minute is just thirty seconds per pose!

Adapt Festival 1, 2013, by Fred Hatt

The second set consisted of two five-minute poses and an eight-minute pose,

Adapt Festival 2, 2013, by Fred Hatt

followed by four three-minute “moving poses”, in which the models performed a simple movement phrase repeatedly for three minutes. This was real movement drawing – the eye had to take in a shape and then draw it from memory, because even a second later, the body position had already changed.

Adapt Festival 3, 2013, by Fred Hatt

Then there was an eighteen minute pose (the back-to-back pose at the top of the drawing below), and then ten one-minute and five two-minute poses, on the lower part of the drawing below and the one below that.

Adapt Festival 4, 2013, by Fred Hatt

Working with very quick poses or models in motion, I like to use a brush and ink. The brush flows with less friction than dry sticks and there’s no time to fiddle around with re-assessing and correcting things anyway, so there’s no reason not to use an indelible medium. As in the asian art of calligraphy, the essence of the act is completely in the moment, in the freedom and intuitive engagement of the slippery brush.

Adapt Festival 5, 2013, by Fred Hatt

In the ancient Latin philosophical poem De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”), Lucretius proposes an atomic theory of the universe in which unpredictable deviations (swerves, or “clinamen“) in the motion of particles cause convergences and separations that give rise to the living physical universe, and allow for the existence of free will. Clinamen is basically what contemporary scientists would describe as quantum indeterminacy. Lucretius says:

When atoms move straight down through the void by their own weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. But if they were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the void, like drops of rain, and no collision would occur, nor would any blow be produced among the atoms. In that case, nature would never have produced anything.

Marisol quick poses 1, 2013, by Fred Hatt

The “swerve” of the drawn line is what makes it expressive, and what makes it a recognizable analog of the subject being depicted. Physics may involve a lot of straight lines, but biology is all curves. To study biological forms through drawing is to work with curves in all their varieties.

Terry quick poses 2, 2013, by Fred Hatt

Quick drawing is like skiing the slalom, sliding with maximum speed, swerving with maximum responsiveness. When it works, a few simple strokes of ink can suggest the propulsive or serene energy of the living body.

Bethany quick poses 2, 2013, by Fred Hatt

The sketchbook pages shown in this post are 14″ x 17″ per page, usually shown as double pages. The “AdAPT Festival” drawings are 38″ x 50″. The drawing at the top of the post is aquarelle crayon on black paper, 19″ x 25″.

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2013/08/24

In the Presence of the Watcher

Filed under: Photography: Light Painting,Sculpture,Video: Visual Art — Tags: Bellavia, Brushwood, Collaborations, Exhibits, Installation, Landscape, Light Painting, Sculpture — fred @ 14:25

The Watcher at Night, 2013, photo by Fred Hatt

The Watcher is a life-size figurative sculpture that overlooks a quiet path in the woods at the Brushwood Folklore Center in Sherman, New York. It’s been there for six or seven years, but coming upon it, you’d think it had been there for centuries. It seems to grow out of the land, manifesting the spirit of the place.

The Watcher, front view, 2009, by Fred Hatt

If this is a wood nymph, it is no pale, delicate fairy. The Watcher is rough and gnarled like an old tree, an embodiment of life force that survives the lashings of seasons by twisting and toughening and enduring.

The Watcher, back view, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

Bellavia is the artist who created The Watcher. For many years she has been a strong presence in the creative community of the festivals at Brushwood. A few years ago she moved from Western New York to New Orleans, but still returns to Brushwood when she can. (Click on her name above to see other artwork by Bellavia.)

Bellavia, 2004, photo and face paint by Fred Hatt

The Watcher is made is made of bronze, pine, burlap, organic matter, fiberglass resin, bone, and cast glass. Parts of it are cast from a live model, Liag, who is a friend of the artist. Liag told me “I have felt an attachment to The Watcher since I first saw Bella’s sketches in 2004. The process of me becoming part of the sculpture, my torso and arms and hand, was profound. I feel she is now part of me. I sense her presence within and around me all the time. She is alive.”

Head of the Watcher, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

I asked Bellavia if she designed the work in advance or if it emerged from experimentation. She replied, “I had a rough vision of the piece when I started. It turned out a little like the sketches but so very different at the same time. The piece itself takes over at some point and brings itself to the front and I just become a conduit for it.”

Hand of the Watcher, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

She said the Watcher “was not made with brushwood in mind. I don’t work with places in mind for the work. I simply could not move her down south with me and I felt like I really wanted to give something back to the community at Brushwood.”

The Watcher, upper body, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

For Bellavia, the work is about female identity and body image. In an artist’s statement, she says:

As a human who happens to be a woman I am all too aware that public opinion and disapproval is something that we are still essentially bound by. Our societal teachings about the many aspects of “self” are generally distorted and inaccurate. I am interested in presenting the viewer with a look into those distortions and offering glimpses of the possibilities in transforming that fear of disapproval or censure. My personal modes of perception towards the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities cause my work to be up close, personal and visceral. My artwork is exploration as a process of defining/redefining an image of the self and body. Oftentimes beautiful, dangerous and disturbing, a palpable presence arises from my work. There is always a hint of darkness underneath the beauty, completing the circle of light and dark. My work is daring, and shows courage, grace and beauty in being willing to challenge normal assumptions about sexuality and boundaries. I am very upfront about the assertion of ones sexuality and exploration of such. I am often my own subject, facing myself, my past and my demons. I endeavor to show the transformation process that starts in the soul towards a new definition of the self. This artistic process brings a freedom from the weight of prejudices, traditions, and custom and the healing from that lies not in distancing myself from it, not in attempting to heal it, but in embracing the experience as part of being alive.

Eye of the Watcher, 2013, photo by Fred Hatt

Eye of the Watcher, 2013, light painting photo by Fred Hatt

Many people are drawn to spend time with The Watcher, and a sort of altar has grown around the base of the sculpture. I feel a power in the work, and I’ve occasionally tried to capture some of its spirit in photographs. This summer, I used The Watcher as a model for light painting. Light painting photographs are taken in the dark with a long exposure time, during which I move around the subject with flashlights or other hand-held lights, applying strokes of light to bring out aspects of the form or to suggest energy within.

The Watcher with Wings, 2013, photo by Fred Hatt

The Watcher with Wings, 2013, light painting photo by Fred Hatt

The video below is made up of some of my light painting images of The Watcher, dissolving one into another so that light seems to move around and animate her earthy form. This is my personal exploration of the palpable presence of The Watcher.

The Watcher from Fred Hatt on Vimeo.

All of the photographs in this video are straight shots, with no digital painting or manipulation.

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2012/12/31

My 2012 in Images

Filed under: Autobiography,Photography: The Seasons — Tags: Art Modeling, Artist Dream, Blacklight, Body Paint, Brushwood, Collaborations, Crayons, Dance, Exhibits, Experimental Performance, Kristin Hatleberg, Landscape, Movement Drawing, NYC, Sketch, Urban Landscape — fred @ 23:24

Drawing, 2012, by Fred Hatt

As the calendar rolls over, I looked back through my photos from the year 2012, to remember what I saw and did and made, and I chose some images that stick with me – images that haven’t previously appeared on Drawing Life.

Northampton Tree, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Early in 2012, I made several short trips, visiting my brother Frank in Western Massachusetts, my friends April and Paul in Connecticut, and my friend Alex in upstate New York, giving me a chance to experience quieter, more open environments than my usual habitat of urban hustle and bustle. (In the photo above you can see Frank in profile in the lower left corner.)

Goshen Morning, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

I love to look at trees in the winter, when their elaborate branching networks are exposed. Branching patterns are among the fundamental organic forms, seen not just in trees but also in blood vessels and nerves, in lightning, in river deltas, in anything that involves permeating flow.

Fallen Tree in Winter Stream, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Look at the branching toes of an emu, and watch how the huge bird moves, contemplating its kinship to its ancient ancestors, the dinosaurs.

Emu Foot, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Look at the nobility of this strong animal, an alpaca, with its enormous crystalline eyes.

Alpaca, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Here’s another mammalian profile – mine – in a self-portrait photo taken in one of the projection booths at the Museum of Modern Art. I work as a freelance film projectionist, a proud member of the Projectionists’ Union Local 306.

Fred in the booth, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

I live in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn. The neighborhood has recently seen a huge influx of hipsters and yuppies, but the old traditions are still maintained – like the tradition of throwing one’s sneakers to hang from the overhead wiring.

Shoes on the Wire, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Religious displays and holiday symbols are shown everywhere, an expression of identity, values, and sentiment.

Saint and Savior, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

“Ghost Bikes“, painted white and bedecked with flowers, are placed as monuments to bicyclists killed by drivers by the friends of the deceased. This one has a plaque above it (not shown here) that indicates it has been there since 2005.

Ghost Bike, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Often my eye is captured by simple street scenes. For a fleeting moment, the arrangement of colors and elements become something wonderful. A ready camera and quick reflexes can sometimes grab one of those moments for more leisurely aesthetic contemplation.

Girl and Flowers, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Houston Street at Night, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

“If you see something, say something” is the slogan in public service advertisements encouraging citizens to report suspicious things to authorities. Big city people see so many odd things all the time they get pretty blasé – it’s all just “something, something.” At least that’s how it appears in these partially stripped-away stickers on the stair risers.

Something Something, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

I went to a party on the rooftop of some friends who live on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, and I was able to take two shots showing the skyline of Lower Manhattan behind that of Downtown Brooklyn, in the afternoon and at twilight.

View from Flatbush Avenue, by Day and by Dusk, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Later I went to the one-year birthday party for the twins of my friends Yuliya and Yevgeniy (portrait drawings of the twins are at the bottom of this post). They were staying at a friend’s place on a placid, mirrorlike lake.

Mirror Lake, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

In June I came back from work late one evening to see a house in my neighborhood engulfed in flames.

House Fire, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Firefighters in Smoke, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Later in the summer I visited my parents in the town in Oklahoma where I grew up. I went to look at the house I lived in when I was in my 20’s, and found it like this, a charred shell. I don’t know the story behind this.

Burned House on East Maple, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

In the middle of the summer I went to Sirius Rising, a festival in Western New York where I have long taught workshops and done art and body painting. I found this extravagant caterpillar crawling across my painting drop cloth.

Horned Caterpillar, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Here’s one of my body paintings from the festival.

Flaming Rose, 2012, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

And here’s a sketch of the branches of the crabapple tree under which I sat to paint on people.

Foliage, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Later in the summer, my friend the dancer Kristin Hatleberg had been granted studio time in the city to pursue a project with dancers exploring different ways of capturing the experience of movement, through words, through photography and video, and through drawing, and then responding to those other media again through movement. Just my type of thing!

Fred Drawing Kristin Dancing, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt (tripod and intervalometer)

In the fall I visited Alex in the Catskills again. We went to Kaaterskill Falls and took pictures of the waterfalls, of people and dogs playing in the falls, and of each other.

Alex with Camera, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Fred with Camera, 2012, photo by Alex Kahan

I also found some beautiful things to photograph on a trip to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, with my friend Corinna and her little daughter Autumn.

Red, Black and Green, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Lotus Leaves, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

This fall was the season of Hurricane Sandy, a gigantic “superstorm” that wrecked the East coastline of the U.S. with surging flood waters. I took this picture of a tree in my neighborhood as it was being whipped by Sandy’s turbulent winds.

Storm Winds, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

My own neighborhood suffered no severe damage, but the next morning most of the leaves of the trees were on the ground.

After the Storm, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Things like wooden fences were down too. Lower Manhattan had no electricity for most of a week and many low-lying areas (including many parts of the city full of artists’ studios and art galleries) were flooded. I was lucky to live on slightly higher ground.

Broken Fence, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Here’s the house on my block that burned in June (see pictures above). The wrecked frame of the house had been shrouded in a blue tarp. Sandy shredded that tarp up pretty good.

Tattered Tarp on Burned House, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Many Subway lines were flooded. Transit Authority workers put in a heroic effort to get the trains back running as quickly as possible after the storm, because public transit really is the essential life blood of the city. For about a week, I had to walk a mile to catch an alternative train into Manhattan, because my local line under the river was submerged. The alternative line crosses the Williamsburg Bridge, and waiting for the train I captured this urban sunset vision.

Williamsburg Bridge Trains, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

The hurricane was followed a few days later by a nor’easter, an autumn lashing of wet snow and cold rain. I took this picture with on-camera flash, so the snowflakes near the camera look like big, out-of-focus white blobs.

Wet Snow, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Much of my artwork from 2012 has already appeared on Drawing Life. I noticed in looking through my images from the year that I did a lot of body painting and some light painting photography this year – enough to warrant their own posts some time soon. As the new year comes in, I think it’s appropriate to finish this post with an image from “Gaia Rebirth“, a collaborative performance by a collective of musicians and dancers called the Artist Dream Family, for which I did some blacklight body painting early in December. May 2013 be a year of rebirth and renewal for us all!

Gaia Rebirth, 2012, performance by the Artist Dream Family, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

The dancers seen in this photo are, from left to right, Pia Monique Murray, Goussy Celestin, and Zen Marie Holmes.

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2012/08/07

Forms of Fire

Filed under: Photography: Elemental Forces,Poetry — Tags: Brushwood, Landscape, Nature, Seasons, Snapshots — fred @ 22:05

Dancing Fire Man, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

I recently returned from a week teaching art workshops at the Sirius Rising festival at Brushwood Folklore Center in Chautauqua County, New York. I’ve been going to festivals at Brushwood since 1999, and it’s one of the special places in my world. The climactic celebration at every festival is a huge community bonfire. Here are some pictures from this year’s fire, with a few comments and two poems (written by others).

Circling the Bonfire, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Flames engulf the wood-stack, wriggling and leaping skyward. This year’s pyre bore a carved blue dragon. You can see the dragon’s trumpet-like shout and curled horns in the next two shots. Salts of copper in the dragon color the flames blue and green.

Bonfire Nebula, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Horned Dragon, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

TO THE GOD OF FIRE AS A HORSE

A hymn from the Rig Veda (1500-1200 BC) in an English version by Robert Kelly

Your eyes do not make mistakes.

Your eyes have the sun’s seeing.

Your thought marches terribly in the night

blazing with light & the fire

breaks from your throat as you whinny in battle.

Blue Ghost, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

This fire was born in a pleasant forest

This fire lives in ecstasy somewhere in the night.

Arising Goddess, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

His march is a dagger of fire

His body is enormous

His mouth opens & closes as he champs on the world

He swings the axe-edge of his tongue

smelting & refining the raw wood he chops down.

Lady Liberty, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

He gets ready to shoot & fits arrow to bowstring

He hones his light to a fine edge on the steel

He travels through night with rapid & various movements

His thighs are rich with movement.

He is a bird that settles on a tree.

(from Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe & Oceania edited with commentaries by Jerome Rothenberg)

Launch, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Gazing into the fire is simultaneously exciting and calming. The movement is too rapid to fully comprehend, but we know that this energy is within us, in the pulse of our arteries and the impulse of our nerves, the heat of our passions and the controlled combustion that is a life.

Firewatchers, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Firelight and Glowsticks, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Revelers in the Ember Field, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

I try to understand the essence of fiery energy by studying the forms of flame. Combustion is all movement, so it’s really an abstraction to look at it as a still picture, but my slow draftsman’s brain likes to freeze the motion so I can trace its contours. Photography is my tool for stopping time. For the raging flames at the top of this post, a fast shutter speed (a thousandth of a second) shows the turbulence of shredded incandescent gas. The images below use slow shutter speeds (half a second or more) to trace the movement of glowing embers as they rise through the column of heated air above the flames.

Bonfire Centerpost, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

These scribbles on the sky remind me of the tracings of fermions and bosons recorded in the cloud chamber of a nuclear partical accelerator. They drift and loop and zag unpredictably. This is the kind of energy I try to bring to my own drawings.

Incandescent Flux, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Dance of Hephaestos, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

THIS IS THE TIME OF FIRE

a poem by Elaine Maria Upton

There is a time of Water and a time of Wind.
This is the time of Fire, and Fire eats time.
The sands of the desert are uncountable!
Let go of the reckoning! Let go of time!
Let go of rain! Let go of forgiving!

Fountain of Sparks, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Cloud Chamber, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Fire eats rain and Fire eats trees. Fire eats
The leaves of corn. Fire is the grain and the husk
Of corn. Fire is the raging of Water. Fire is the roar,
the hum, the sting of Wind. Fire is the pepper pulsing
from the flower. Fire is the frenzied volcano dancing.
It is the lightning’s blitz, the drumming, the singing,
The beat of tribes, telling their story all night,
Piercing the bottom of dark, birthing the light.

Pyre, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Fire is the Earth exhausted, folding, sleeping
from days and nights of love, til there is no counting.
When flowers bleed, when lions sleep, when angels sigh, oh bleed, oh
sleep, oh sigh then! Oh, burn with mountains!
When leaves flame and fall to the ground,
When grass grows brown then gray, grieve not.
Grieve not, but follow the eagle and follow the grass.

Bottle Brush, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

River of Embers, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

Weep not for the Earth. Weep not for the corn.
The Earth is the lover who gives all to love.
The Earth makes a bed of Love and the Sun knows.
The Earth makes a table of Love and the Fire knows.
The Earth feeds Fire. The Earth gives all to Love.
Follow the Earth. Look beyond your eyes as you go!
Follow the Earth to the beat of the Fire!
Open your thighs. Give all to Love!

From the website Poet Seers

Fiery Tresses, 2012, photo by Fred Hatt

For more photos of fire, check this earlier post.

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2011/08/12

Chaotic Landscape

Filed under: Drawing: Experimenting — Tags: Brushwood, Crayons, Landscape, Nature, Process, Seasons, Sketch, Technique — fred @ 21:36

Mixed Grass, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Drawing landscapes and plants is not my strong suit. I love wildernesses and gardens, but I feel overwhelmed trying to capture their forms in drawing or painting. They present a bewildering chaos of detail, a vast, borderless scale, and a range of color and tone that makes my palette look paltry. My urge to draw operates comfortably at the scale of the human body, a form and an expressive range I know intimately from inside and out. But the body is a product of Earth, an efflorescence of organic forms that reflect evolutionary history and evoke the forms of the land and its creatures. A hip is a hill, an ear a shell, an elbow a crooked branch. Even if the body is my primary subject, I need to understand it as a microcosm by looking to the macrocosm. And purely from the standpoint of practice, I can only benefit by straying outside my comfort zone, trying to draw what I am incompetent to draw. In this post I’ll present some of my awkward stabs at landscape. I’ll immediately make them look worse by setting them in the context of some real masters!

The sketch of my own I’ve chosen to head this post was made while looking at a field of mixed short grasses and weeds in a rural field. I was struck by the variety of different leaf shapes all jumbled together. What seems at first glance a tranquil and plush tapestry of green becomes on close inspection a dense jungle, and that is surely how it would appear if you could shrink to the size of an ant to make your way through it.

Below is Albrecht Dürer’s astonishingly realistic watercolor portrayal of a similar patch of sod, known as the “Great Piece of Turf” (Go to this link to see it in a much larger size). Botanists can clearly identify at least nine species of herbs in this drawing. The production of this painting was an act of profound and sustained meditation on the reality of nature, made at a time when nature in art was usually idealized and symbolic, a mere setting for human and spiritual subjects. The artist’s intensity of attention, directed at something that most would see as utterly inconsequential, has preserved a bit of nature over the centuries like a specimen in amber. Dürer has captured the chaotic quality of wild plant life, but has somehow given it a kind of clarity that even photography couldn’t provide. This painting sets a standard that every great naturalist illustrator can only hope to approach.

The Great Piece of Turf, 1503, by Albrecht Dürer

Even if the detail of photography rarely achieves the clarity of Dürer’s vision, by the late nineteenth century many painters had ceded this kind of hard physical detail to the new light-capturing technology and tried instead to depict the wild energy of the natural world with brushy, gestural strokes of color that give a sense of leaves fluttering in a breeze and rays of light dancing over and through shimmery water and misty air. Claude Monet painted the same scenes over and over again, at different seasons and times of day, striving to capture the mercurial subtleties of luminosity and atmosphere.

Rainy Morning on the Seine, 1890’s (?), by Claude Monet

Charles Burchfield is a magical realist, seeing the natural world as a physical manifestation of different qualities of spiritual energy. The forms of land and sky and plants are abstracted slightly to more closely resemble the Platonic archetypes of these forces. The chaos is there, but it is unified within a greater spirit of pure Nature.

Dawn of Spring, 1960’s (?), by Charles E. Burchfield

I have usually avoided drawing and painting the landscape, but I’ve frequently tried to capture it with photography. I’ve always felt especially drawn to the raw and ragged forms of uncultivated plant life. Thick thatches of foliage are challenging subjects even for photography, as the transition from three dimensions to two reduces the bursting and branching shapes to a flat patchwork like a camouflage pattern. Stereo photography can better portray the complexity. If you look at the picture below (previously posted here) with red/cyan 3D glasses you’ll see what I mean. If you look at it without glasses, it’s pure abstract field.

Sprouting Hedge, 2010, stereo photo by Fred Hatt

But now let’s take a look at some of my recent fumbling attempts to draw complex, chaotic plant forms. Just today I took a sketchbook and a camera to my neighborhood park. Here’s a snapshot of a particularly plush evergreen tree, and below it, my scribbly marker sketch, drawn from direct observation of the tree without any reference to the photo.

Evergreen, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

Evergreen, 2011, sketch by Fred Hatt

The drawing doesn’t get much of the texture or spatial form of the tree, but it has, perhaps, something of its energy. Another day I made a sketch of the plants growing in a window box, with these ornate curly leaves in front of a stand of long spear-like leaves. This is a smaller subject, a closer focus, and a more careful hand with the drawing.

Leaves, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Here’s a sketch of a flowering plant with trumpet-shaped flowers (some kind of orchid?) drooping thickly around a central stalk. (If anyone recognizes any of the species depicted in these drawings, let me know – my botanical taxonomical knowledge is practically nonexistent.)

Flowers, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Last month I spent a week teaching workshops and attending the festival at the Brushwood Folklore Center in Western New York State. I spent some of my spare time making crayon sketches. Here you see the fire-builders’ woodpile in the foreground, the Roundhouse (a sort of ritual structure for drum circles) and bonfire stack in the middle ground, and the trees of the forest in the background.

Roundhouse and Bonfire Stack, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The sky was clear, deep and luminous, with the great zaftig white bodies of cumulus clouds lazing across the heavens like manatees in a warm current.

Clouds, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Near my campsite was this traditional Plains Indian tepee.

Tepee, 2011, by Fred Hatt

This last Brushwood landscape was drawn a couple of years ago. This is a clump of plants in the hollow under a big tree where the henna artists and body painters decorate people.

Under the Henna Tree, 2009, by Fred Hatt

I still always feel completely unequal to the task when I try to make a drawing from a landscape, but I try to open myself to the chaos and let some attenuated remnant of that vast current flow through me and into my sketch. I may feel like a mouse trying to sing opera, but sometimes it is better to squeak than to be silent.

Drawings on black paper are 9″ x 12″, medium is aquarelle crayon. Drawings on white paper are 11″ x 14″ or smaller, medium is brush-tip marker. The images of pieces by other artists were found on the web; clicking on a picture links to source.

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