Attraction, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The Center for Remembering and Sharing, or CRS, is an organization devoted to supporting and teaching healing arts and creative arts.  Their studios near Union Square in Manhattan host dance and yoga classes, bodywork sessions, film screenings, performances (music, dance and theater), and meditation and energy healing circles.  I got involved with CRS several years ago because their excellent performing arts program, directed by Christopher Pelham, is one of a handful of organizations (along with Cave and the Japan Society) regularly presenting  butoh dance, the experimental Japanese performance art that grows out of the work of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno.  I first studied butoh in 1992 (in a workshop at La MaMa Experimental Theatre with Yoko Ashikawa), and have performed and collaborated with many butoh artists since then.  On several occasions I was involved in events at CRS, as a performer, video or light artist, or performance videographer.  Through those events I got to know Chris Pelham and CRS’s founder Yasuko Kasaki, and in 2010 they invited me to exhibit my artwork at CRS.  Last year I blogged about it as an upcoming show and posted a transcript of the interview Yasuko conducted with me at the opening.  In this post I’ll share all the drawings I made specifically for the CRS show, and talk a little about my experience making them.

Healing Circle 1, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Aside from the creative arts programs, CRS is a center for spiritual healing.  Practitioners use visualizations, focused breathing, and meditative mental states to channel and direct energy, much as yogis or martial artists do.  I thought this would be an interesting subject to approach as an artist, so I observed and sketched at some of the healing circles at CRS.  These large ink-brush drawings are based on rough sketches I made on-site.

Healing Circle 2, 2010, by Fred Hatt

It’s been a while since I attended these sessions, and some of the sessions were conducted in Japanese, which I don’t understand, so my memory could be wrong in some details, but I think all the healing sessions began with guided and silent meditation.  I believe there was some private speaking between each healer and his or her receiver.  The person receiving healing would sit meditating in a chair, while the healer would move around them, not touching them, but directing the hands towards various parts of the person’s body as though beaming heat waves at them.  Often the healer would raise one hand towards the sky, connecting to universal energy or Holy Spirit, and face the other hand towards the receiver.

Healing Circle 3, 2010, by Fred Hatt

At other times, a healer would move their hands several inches above the receiver’s body, as though smoothing fabric or combing hair in the air around the receiver.  In this drawing, instead of depicting the healers, I drew the paths of the movements of their hands around the receivers, giving, perhaps, an impression of the patterns of energy the healers perceive or conceive surrounding the body.

Healing Circle 4, 2010, by Fred Hatt

If you know my portraits and figure drawings, you’ll know that I often show “energy lines” or “auras” like this, in work that has nothing to do with spiritual healing.  People sometimes ask me if I can perceive energy, if I really see all the colors I put into my drawings.  I’ll try to answer those questions in this post, the remainder of which is illustrated with my drawings of the hands of various CRS healing practitioners, sketched from life as they sat in meditation.

Blessing, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

I have no sixth sense.  Like anyone else, my eyes perceive only light, and it is through seeing patterns of light that I can discern physical forms and movements.  Through many years of practice in observational drawing, I have trained myself to look with sustained attention, and to notice very subtle variations in form and color.  Through the practice of photography and filmmaking, I have learned a lot about how light works.

Connection, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Science tells us that solid matter is essentially an illusion, that all the diverse substances and objects in the world are just different arrangements of the same fundamental stuff, essentially patterns of energy.  The fundamental particles and forces that make up a blade of grass are the same as those that make a blade of steel, and fire and water are different patterns, not different elements.  We living creatures grow out of chemicals forged in stars, and every breath we breathe contains atoms that have been part of countless other things and beings.

Focus, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Our perception has evolved to show us a world of solid matter and separate objects.  For basic animal functioning, it’s a highly effective way of understanding what is around us, but it is an illusion.  I have made it a project of my life to try to train myself to see through that illusion, to make the unified field of reality not just an intellectual understanding, but a lived experience.  It seemed to me that our default mode of interpreting sensory input is the most powerful impediment to getting the deeper reality of what we know, and that a practice of honing perception might be a fruitful path.  My visual art practices are about learning to see the world in a way that I believe is truer than the default way, and about communicating that vision to others.  To put it simply, I try to perceive physical things, especially the human form, as patterns of energy, rather than as objects.

Heart, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Perhaps some people really can perceive invisible energies directly through the eyes.  Synesthesia is a well-known phenomenon in which sensory pathways get crossed, so that a synesthete might perceive particular musical notes as having colors, for example.  There are many variations of synesthesia, and perhaps seeing auras is a synesthetic phenomenon.  Alternatively, it could be a matter of intuition heightened by imagination – that’s what some who claim to teach clairvoyance seem to be describing.  I don’t know, because I don’t perceive that way, though intuitive imagination is a fundamental aspect of art, mine as much as anyone else’s, and you can see that in these examples especially in the backgrounds, which are essentially imaginative developments around the form of the hands (more on backgrounds later).

Insight, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Instead, my practice is to try to link the actual mark-making as closely as possible to the act of perceiving.  Ideally, every saccadic glance should be a stroke of the crayon or brush or whatever.  Every mark should move as though it is flowing over the surface it is describing.  The curves and rhythms of the movements of my drawing hand should reflect the patterns of organic growth that create the forms of the body, or whatever else I am drawing.  My aim is to work in the most direct and dynamic way possible, and in that way to achieve an image in which flow IS form.

Light, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

This approach can be steered more toward classical realism, by working to make contours and gradations as accurate as possible to what I see, or it can be steered more toward expressionism, by allowing the marks to be freer and looser – by letting the hand dance on the paper.  It’s like the musical distinction between playing it straight and swinging.  Generally the looser style creates a more immediate impression of energy in the viewer of the drawing.  I find that accuracy of proportion is rather unimportant – if the lines have the flow of life, the drawing has life.

Receiving, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The colors are just exaggerated from what I see.  In the drawing below, for example, I could see in looking at these hands that the knuckles were slightly more reddish than the rest of the skin, and the area around the veins slightly more bluish.  Color perception is highly relativistic anyway – our way of perceiving color is to compare adjacent areas to see how different they are.   In drawing, I often exaggerate these differences.  If I’m going for the more realistic style, I work at neutralizing the extreme colors by layering them with opposing colors, and the end product can look fairly convincing, when the colors combine in the eye.  If I’m being more expressionistic, I like to keep the more extreme color contrasts.

Rest, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

In these drawings, the backgrounds are fanciful abstractions.  Sometimes elements of the real background come into it.  In the drawing above, the river of color underneath the hands contains some forms derived from the wrinkles in the pants of the model, whose hands were resting on her thighs.  More often in these drawings, the backgrounds are made by echoing and extending curves in the subject, making a pattern that derives from the hands but also tries to express something of the intuitive feeling I get from the individual who is posing for me.  This aspect of these drawings really is the imaginative projection I discussed above, but it takes place strictly on the paper – it’s not something I could see without drawing.

Strength, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

I suppose it could be objected that my practice of working as closely as possible to direct perception of the subject, while treating the pictorial background as a projected abstraction, remains a form of separating objects, and therefore does not achieve the vision of unity I described as my ideal.  Alas, my practice doesn’t quite meet my goal.  It’s just the best I’ve been able to do so far in depicting the body as a pattern of energy, and it’s still a work in progress.

Warmth, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The “Healing Circle” ink brush drawings are 22.25″ x 30″ (56.5 cm x 76.2 cm).  The “Healing Hands” aquarelle crayon drawings are 18.4″ x 24.5″ (46.7 cm x 62.2 cm).

Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown

If you emerge from a hot tub or shower into the cold night, you may see rivulets of steam rising from your skin.  If the environment is dark and a light source illuminates the steam from behind, you can see it clearly.  A runner on a chilly morning may also generate steam from the body, but it’s usually difficult to see in daylight.

Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown

My longtime friend and collaborator, Corinna Hiller Brown, a butoh dancer and movement therapist, had the idea of trying to capture this effect on video, combined with trancelike butoh dance.  On a snowy winter night in 2005, in my studio in Brooklyn, we turned off the heat, opened all the windows and doors, and pulled a box fan out of off-season storage, trying to get the room as cold as possible.  Corinna repeatedly got in and out of a hot shower, so when she entered the chilly studio her skin would steam for a couple of minutes – just enough to get a quick take.  Later that same night, I filmed the snowflakes eddying under the street lamps outside.

There was no way to assemble the fragments of dance into a connected choreography, but the slow downward drift of the snow through shifting currents of air worked well as a transitional element, echoing in reverse the movement of the glowing steam curling up from the warm skin.  The first, simple edit of this material was used as a projection element with “My Love Bleeds Fire”, a choreographed piece that Corinna premiered at the Cool New York Dance Festival at White Wave.

Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown

Seven years later, I’ve finally completed a version of the video that I feel stands alone as a piece of poetic cinema.  For the soundtrack, multi-instrumentalist Gregory Reynolds created a jangly droning sound with swelling bass notes, which I mixed with recordings I’d made of ocean surf and rain.

Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown

For me, the film is a vision of the warmth of life in the cold world.  I described it thus:  “The body is a slow flame, a campfire in the snow, a star in the vastness of space, a pulsing heart in the ocean.”  Every living being is a kind of fire.  Metabolism is combustion.  Life force is like a flame, cohering as long as it consumes experience, adhering to the body as a candle flame clings to its wick.  The heart and mind of a sentient being give warmth and light into the world.

Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown

The title, “Inner Heat”, refers to a traditional Tibetan meditation practice called tummo.  A combination of breathing exercises and highly focused visualizations can produce enough heat in the body to survive in the snows of the Himalayas.  This is more than just legendary tantric magic, as Harvard researchers have documented the ability of experienced tummo practitioners to produce striking changes in body heat and other supposedly autonomic bodily functions.

Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown

I suggest viewing this video as a meditation.  Give yourself over to the waves of slow movement and feel the warmth generating within your own belly and heart, and be a source of light in the darkness.  The video is embedded below (except in the email subscription version of the blog), or click the link to see “Inner Heat” on my Vimeo page.

Claudia, the Museworthy blogger, has posted “The Museworthy Art Show”, a collection of artwork by her regular readers and commenters.  One of my large-scale multi-figure drawings is included, a piece that hasn’t yet been seen on Drawing Life.

This is a kind of group show I like.  The artists are diverse in media, style, approach, and level of training.  Simple sketches appear alongside elaborate compositions.  The virtues of spontaneity and simplicity shine, as do the accomplishments of refined craft.  And Claudia has fostered a feeling of community among her far-flung readers, since now we’ve all been in a group show together.  Museworthy tribe, represent!

Click to visit The Museworthy Art Show.

Dear readers, I’ll have another post for you here some time this week, but in the meantime check out my “guest post” on Daniel Maidman’s blog.  Daniel’s a figurative painter, of a more classical bent than me, and he’s also a stimulating writer, often considering artistic issues in the light of scientific and philosophical ideas.  I wrote a rather extensive comment on Daniel’s recent post, “The Integrated Visual Field”, going into what I’ve learned about the science of human visual perception as it pertains to observational drawing.  Daniel invited me to expand on that response, and then he combined my comments with those of Stephen Wright, another really interesting figurative artist, and made the whole thing into this guest post.  I hope some of you will appreciate being turned on to Maidman’s blog.

Bow, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Actor and writer Susan Merson invited me to make sketches at some of the sessions of New York Theatre Intensives, a six-week play development workshop and training program associated with New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre.  Susan likes to get visual artists to respond in their own medium to the creative process of the actors, directors and writers.  The work is shared with the participants and may be used on the organization’s website and/or public presentations.

I attended two sessions there.  The first one was an acting workshop led by Janet Zarish.  I sat at the side of the room and sketched in white crayon on a 9″ x 12″ black pad.  The class began with warm-up exercises, including spine rolls, the game of tag, and slow-motion tag.  Since I’ve done a lot of movement drawing, this part of the class was a natural for me.

Tag, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Following the movement exercises, the acting students stood listening to the instructor.  Their postures show their energetic engagement.

Listen, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Next, various pairs of acting students performed their versions of little playlets.  The acting duos had been given a page or two of bare dialog, and they had to invent a context and back story and work it up into a scene.  They’d play the scene two or three times, with coaching and notes from the acting instructor.  I tried to make simplified personality sketches, essentially caricatures, of the actors playing their parts.  Fleeting expressions and attitudes are hard to catch in a drawing from life!

Copier, 2011, by Fred Hatt

In most of these, I tried to get more than one expression or position for at least one of the characters.  Without knowing the content of the scenes, you can see these as multiple-figure compositions.  Some kind of narrative content is implied in the drawings, but they’re highly ambiguous.  I don’t think anyone could guess much about the actors’ scenes from these sketches, but maybe the sketches could be imagination stimuli.  For instance, I could see the central figures in the one below as a couple’s public composure, while the faces on the edges represent hidden attitudes.

AA Meeting, 2011, by Fred Hatt

This exercise only increased my admiration for the great theatrical illustrator Al Hirschfeld, who spent eight decades at Broadway openings, sketching in a theater seat, and stylizing his impressions of the actors as elegant ink drawings that appeared alongside reviews in the New York Times.  Drawing actors in action is not easy, and I feel my attempts were pretty rough.

Afterlife, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The three sketches above are based on three acting duos’ interpretations of the same playlet, an encounter between two characters with diverging views of their relationship.  I’ve titled the sketches after context choices made by the actors.

The next three sketches are three different interpretations of a second playlet.  This one centers around one character trying to collect a long-overdue debt from the other character.  It was fascinating to observe how different choices and different actors’ personæ completely changed the feeling of the scene.

Hot Dog Park, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Naked Under Hoodie, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The actress below conveyed a particularly vivid sense of awkward nervousness toward her impassive debtor.

Wordvomit, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The acting class instructor, Janet Zarish, threw a lot of ideas at the actors, offering suggestions and modifications aimed at sharpening the characters and punching up the drama.  I was struck by her many crisp, incisive gestures.  I think they reflect her focus on performative clarity.

Instructor, 2011, by Fred Hatt

I sat in on another New York Theatre Intensives session, and will get to those sketches later in this post, but first, a sketch theater entr’acte.  American Independence Day, the fourth of July, fell between the two NYTI classes I attended.  Spring Studio, where I supervise one of the regular figure drawing sessions, hosted a July 4 special with models costumed as historical American characters, including a Revolutionary War era soldier, Buffalo Bill, Harriet Tubman, Pocahontas and Betsy Ross.  These sketches are in marker or pencil on white paper, 18″ x 24″, and all are based on poses held between two minutes and ten minutes.

American History Figures, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Noble Faces, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The models for this session were all what I would describe as character models.  Like character actors, they have distinctive faces, body types and ways of moving and looking that would stimulate the narrative imagination even without the costumes and props.  It’s impossible to draw these models in a generic way, because all of them are so distinctive.

Caretaker, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Small and Tall, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Barricade, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Later that week I went to a “rep class” session, led by Rod Menzies, at New York Theatre Intensives.  The actors did readings of new scenes by playwrights Crystal Skillman and Jason Holtham, with the playwrights present.  I believe part of the function of the session was for the writers to see how their work in progress was understood by the actors, and how it worked in front of an audience.  These drawings are 18″ x 24″ on white paper, in crayon and/or ink and brush.  Here’s the scene in the studio, with the instructor and playwright sitting at the left.

Studio Reading, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Crystal Skillman’s scene was for two actors, and a little longer than the playlets from the acting class, which gave me a better opportunity to study the actors.  The experience was a bit like what I imagine a courtroom artist does.

A Look, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Here’s my impression of the discussion, with the class instructor and the playwright at the left, and some of the students in discussion at the right.  They really did overlap like that, from my viewing position.  I chose to make them transparent.

Watching and Discussing, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Although the actors sitting to read stayed more still than they did in the acting class, where they had memorized their lines, it’s still hard to draw a reading, because the actors have their heads and eyes down at their scripts much of the time, and their facial expressions and energetic engagements with one another tend to be fleeting.  This remained so even after instructor Rod Menzies urged the actors to engage with each other even at the cost of missing lines in the scripts.

Cold Reading, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Model U. N., 2011, by Fred Hatt

Jason Holtham’s scene was about high school students at a Model United Nations simulation conference.  All the characters were named after the nations they were representing in the conference, which allowed the scene to be read on two levels.

Playwright, 2011, by Fred Hatt

I switched to ink and brush for a few sketches.  The brushed ink line is more expressive than the crayon line, but also much more difficult to control.

Characters, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The directions of eyes and eyebrows, and the set of the mouth, are the most immediately readable indicators of emotion and relational role, at least among those that can be captured in a quick sketch that lacks the sound of the voice, the movement of the body, and the narrative developments of the script.

Reactions, 2011, by Fred Hatt

For me, the experience of sketching at these theater classes drew on my long-term practice of drawing from movement.  I’m used to sketching from dance, with the attention given to large physical movement.  The actors didn’t move so much – most of the interesting changes going on were subtle facial cues.  In drawing faces, I’m accustomed to doing portraits, where I can take my time to study the structure and character of a face.  Trying to apply the quick-response, gestural interpretation of movement to facial expressions was a challenge I definitely haven’t yet mastered, but I love to keep finding fresh challenges!

I’d be interested to hear from actors or other participants in the classes about what you see in my sketches, and whether they reveal anything to you that you might not get by looking at a still photo or video of the classes.  Please feel free to comment here, and I’ll respond.  (Comments from first-time commenters are held for moderation, so may take a day or so to appear on the blog.)