DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2010/06/28

Reclining, Not Boring

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Poses — Tags: , , , , , , , — fred @ 20:09

Body Helix (Beu), 2010, by Fred Hatt

Some artists denigrate the reclining pose as the choice of the lazy model getting paid to nap.  But reclining poses can embody tension or emotion rather than just relaxation, and the open-minded artist will revel in the chance to see parts of the body foreshortened and juxtaposed in unusual and even complex ways they would never see in a vertically composed pose.  This post is a collection of my recent reclining pose sketches, twenty-minute or ten-minute poses, mostly from the Saturday morning life drawing sessions at Figureworks Gallery in Brooklyn.

The above sketch is as far as possible from the familiar gently-curved sideways reclining nude painted by many artists from Giorgione to Modigliani.  Note particularly the twisted torso, showing both front and back of the body, the balanced angled supports of left arm and leg, and the lower leg folded up the wall.

The posing area at Figureworks is in an archway between two rooms, with artists drawing from both rooms.  Models are not posing in the round, but to two sides, with a sort of frame providing supports for leaning.  The model in the drawing below raised his left leg with his foot up on the wall of the arch:

Dreams (Saeed), 2010, by Fred Hatt

Here are some other uses of the wall as a leg support.  Here the body is held in a state of tension between the hands pressing against the floor and the foot pressing against the wall:

Angle Tension (Theresa), 2010, by Fred Hatt

This pose conveys an unusual bold power in the contrast between the closed upper limbs and the open lower limbs propped against the wall:

Arms Crossed Legs Open (Beu), 2010, by Fred Hatt

Another pose by the same model, also using the wall as a support for the legs:

Right Angle (Beu), 2010, by Fred Hatt

Reclining poses can provide interesting challenges in foreshortening.  I try to see the body as though it were a landscape, with the shapes as hills and mountains arranged at different distances.

Hands Clasped Behind (Jiri), 2010, by Fred Hatt

The face is a particular challenge when seen from an angle at which the features are not in standard frontal relationship.  Studying faces from these unusual perspectives can give you a much stronger sense of their three-dimensional structure.

Lying Back (Danielle), 2009, by Fred Hatt

Ribcage (Jiri), 2009, by Fred Hatt

I often approach the foreshortened forms of the body using cross-contours and studying light that strikes the body from opposite my viewing angle, as in these two studies of the model Corey’s unusually well-defined musculature:

Hammock Style (Corey), 2009, by Fred Hatt

Hugging the Blanket (Corey), 2009, by Fred Hatt

Similar techniques are used to convey the form of this beautiful female back:

Callipygia (Lilli), 2009, by Fred Hatt

Various twists and crossings can add interest to reclining poses:

Ankle Knee Cross (Jiri), 2007, by Fred Hatt

The quick sketch below is interesting because you can see my first approach to analyzing the figure, building it out of ovals, in beige, and then a second stage, going for more precision, in black and white, with significant corrections to proportion and relative positions:

L with Twist (Claudia), 2008, by Fred Hatt

That’s Claudia, the Museworthy blogger.  Here’s another of her great poses.  This is dynamism in a horizontal orientation:

Arm Overhead (Claudia), 2010, by Fred Hatt

Here are three wonderfully sinuous poses from the model Madelyn:

Complex Repose (Madelyn), 2010, by Fred Hatt

Tight Coil (Madelyn), 2010, by Fred Hatt

Supine Arched (Madelyn), 2010, by Fred Hatt

This model created an evocative pose simply by posing with a flashlight, giving a feeling of lying awake at night in a lonely tent:

Flashlight (Taylor), 2010, by Fred Hatt

Contrasting that waking stillness, the final pose in this post gives me the impression of active dreaming:

Dreaming Puppeteer (Theresa), 2010, by Fred Hatt

In previous posts I haven’t always credited all the models by name, but in this case it seemed appropriate, because these poses are all so creative and expressive.  You’ll notice some of the same names appearing several times.  These are magnificent models, and I would never have been able to make these images without them.

All drawings are aquarelle crayon on paper, sizes ranging from 18″ x 24″ to 20″ x 28″.  All are 10-minute or 20-minute sketches, mostly drawn at Figureworks Gallery.

2010/06/11

Face Plus Body

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Portraits — Tags: , , , , , — fred @ 20:32

Betty, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The portrait and the nude are generally considered distinct and separate genres within pictorial art.  The nude is rarely a depiction of a particular person; rather, it is usually generalized or idealized, used to depict eroticism or heroism, struggle or abjection, joy or disgust as universal phenomena.  The portrait is about conveying the essential character of an individual.  Historically, the line separating these subjects was rarely breached, except in the occasional portrait of a mistress. Alice Neel and Lucian Freud both made highly individualized depictions of nudes, but they’re outliers.  In contemporary art, the body is still nearly always de-individualized and even depersonalized, used as a symbol or provocation.

Piera, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The realistically observed portrait has been a staple of art since the Greeks and Romans, but of all the classic genres it has been the most challenged by the rise of photography and the most marginalized by the conceptual turn of contemporary art.  To me portraiture remains a compelling pursuit.  I believe a drawing or painting captures a subjective reality that photographs often miss, and the essence of a person is a rich and complex subject to tackle.

Jeremiah, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The nude portrait became one of my own primary genres simply because, many years ago, I was asked to be the monitor, or session supervisor, for a weekly three-hour nude pose at Spring Studio.  This isn’t the class I would have chosen to run, as I was more interested in quick poses and movement than in long poses and academic rendering.  Nevertheless, learning to sustain my focus and to develop drawings through a longer process was a great learning experience.

Aimi, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Minerva Durham, the proprietor of Spring Studio, favors models who have unique character, and that surely helps keep it interesting for the more advanced artists.  When you draw from life as a regular practice for years, after a time you struggle more with boredom and the rut than you do with form and proportion.  Drawing endless generic nudes could get a bit dry, but if you try to perceive and capture the specialness of each model, it remains much more interesting.

Sue, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The face and the body both show us something about the person’s character and life experience.  The face is the window to the soul but also the public mask of self-presentation.  In the body we see how the energy flows and rests.  The body also conveys a great deal about the subject’s attitude and way of relating to the world.

Kate, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Nude portraits are nearly impossible to sell in a gallery show.  People love these pictures, but no casual collector wants a recognizable picture of a nude individual hanging in their home – even if it is themselves.  People have often commissioned me to do nude portraits of them, and they love the resulting pictures but have difficulty deciding where – or if – they should hang them!  But since I have always supported myself by other work in order to keep my art free from the dictates of the marketplace, I don’t mind that the work is unsellable.

Christophe, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The division separating the nude from the portrait may exist because of market realities, rather than because of any deeper reason.  But the combination, the nude portrait, represents to me a reunification of the primal split in the human soul, our loss of connection with our physicality and our earthly nature.  Technology has allowed us to separate ourselves more and more from Nature, which is our origin and on which we are utterly dependent whether we realize it or not.  Only our own bodies can reassert this primal symbiosis.  A portrayal of face and body as one is a small statement of the unity of spirit and matter.

Amalia, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

There”s a section on nude portraits, as well as one on head-only portraits, on my portfolio site.  Also, many of my previous blog posts have featured nude portraits.

Julio, 2010, by Fred Hatt

All portraits in this post were made in the last six months during the Monday morning long pose session I monitor at Spring Studio.  All are aquarelle crayon on paper.  Sizes range from 18″ x 24″ to 20″ x 28″.

2010/04/23

Healing Hands at CRS

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Energy,My Events: Exhibitions — Tags: , , , , — fred @ 14:25

Healing Hands #11, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Tonight I’m hanging a new suite of drawings entitled Healing Hands for a solo exhibit at CRS, 123 Fourth Avenue  (between 12th and 13th Streets), NYC, second floor.  The artwork will be on view April 24 through May 26, 2010.  The opening reception will take place ONE WEEK LATER, on Saturday, May 1, from 5:30 to 7:30.  On May 1 only, I will show a large selection of my work, in addition to the Healing Hands series, in the beautiful large dance studio at CRS, and at 6:30 I’ll be publicly interviewed by CRS director Yasuko Kasaki.  Details on the opening are here.

I got involved with CRS several years ago, through their performing arts program, Dharma Road Productions, directed by Christopher Pelham.  Dharma Road and CRS sponsor artists from Japan and other countries working in New York, and have become one of the city’s important presenters of butoh dance, action theater, puppet and clown theater and other forms.  I have studied butoh myself and have a long history of collaborating with dance and experimental theater artists.  Since many of these artists were performing at CRS, I had multiple occasions to work there and to get to know Chris and Yasuko.

Earlier this year, CRS renovated their studios.  They’ve added a full schedule of classes and workshops in dance, exercise and meditation, and they’ve appointed Satomi Kitahara as art gallery director.  I was honored to be asked to be the first artist to exhibit visual art in the beautiful new space.

The mission of CRS has always combined performing arts and visual arts with healing arts.  They host regular meditations and healing circles and provide working spaces for practitioners of various bodywork modalities.  Yasuko invited me to observe and sketch at healing circles, and the energy healers who work at CRS sat in meditation for me while I drew their hands.

Healing Hands #2, 2010, by Fred Hatt

If you’re in or near New York City, please join me at the Healing Hands opening on Saturday, May 1.  Please note, the work is on view starting April 24, but the opening reception is one week later, on May 1, 2010!

I also have two pieces in the exhibit Ten Years of Figureworks, which remains on view through June 6, 2010 at Figureworks in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

2010/03/29

Reverse Engineering a Drawing

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Developed Work — Tags: , , , , , , — fred @ 18:55

Twists, 2010 by Fred Hatt

Reverse engineering is taking something apart to find out how it was put together.  The term usually applies to technology or manufactured products, particularly in the case of competitors seeking to discover trade secrets or make knockoffs.  I’ve never heard the phrase applied to an artwork, but a drawing or painting does conceal stages of construction.  In my last post I wrote about artist William Kentridge.  His method of charcoal drawing animation reveals the drawings he exhibits as processes of exploration and development.

Over the last seven years I’ve been making large-scale drawings with multiple overlapping figures.  Each of these is created in close collaboration with a single model.  I call them “chaos compositions” because their process involves drawing over and over on the same page to create a field of chaos, and then working to find a dynamic structure within that chaos.  Many examples, and an explanation of the process, can be found in this gallery on my portfolio site, and others in the blog posts “Time and Line”.  The stages of development of a chaos composition are shown in the post “Composing on the Fly”.

“Twists”, pictured at the top of the post, is a recent chaos composition, 48″ x 60″, or 122 cm x 152 cm, aquarelle crayon on paper, created in collaboration with the great model Madelyn.  Figurative elements are clearly visible, but the overlapping is dense enough that much of it is essentially abstract.  Different colors are used in different figures, making it possible to discern connected parts of individual figures by following lines of certain colors.  I’m trying to create images that require a more active approach to viewing than the traditional straightforward pictorial composition, and finding the starting figures is one way of active looking at these pictures.  It’s a little easier to do this with the original drawings, in which the figures are close to life size, than with a small online reproduction, but here I’m going to do it for you, using cropping and selective digital erasure to separate the component figures.

Figure 1, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The lower part of this figure is easy to see in the finished piece, but the upper part has been heavily overdrawn and is difficult to find.  On these re-separated figures, where you see many other colors crossing over some of the contour lines, as in the left arm above, that is an indication of great density in the final piece.  Below, two figures from the left side of the picture.

Figure 2, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Figure 3, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

One of these figures serves to frame the lower left corner of the picture, while the other turns away, to reach out of the frame.  The line of the back has been sketched twice in the one just above, once in pink and then in a light blue, with a slightly altered repeat of the pose.  Toward the middle of the piece, there are several more dramatic poses.

Figure 4, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Figure 5, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The figure below is particularly hidden.  The hand, in white, really stands out, but the forward-bending figure with the crossed feet is difficult to distinguish in the dense mass of line and color.

Figure 6, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The one below is a little easier to see, but it’s an unusual pose that may be hard to figure out, and the drawing is somewhat distorted.  The model was twisting and leaning to her left side, so the angle of view appears to be from below.

Figure 7, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The figure below is in the upper right corner and has much less overlapping than the central figures.  This pose is a complex sculptural arrangement of counterbalanced curves.

Figure 8, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

In the middle of the composition is this standing figure, which is ghostly and hard to see.  Nearly every part of this figure is masked by something more dominant in its vicinity, including the yellow raised hand, which becomes an echo of the bolder white hand above it.

Figure 9, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Now that you’ve seen the drawing deconstructed, look again at the final version.  There are things going on here that can’t be seen in the separated figures, juxtapositions like the multiple hands in the upper middle area, organic shapes that appear between or in the overlaps of other shapes.  It is a picture of energy, a sketch of a single figure moving in time and space, an attempt to see in four dimensions.  I hope that the total is more than the sum of its parts.

Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Thanks again to Madelyn, the model for this piece, a fine model and a great creative collaborator.

2010/03/15

Top Ten Countdown

Filed under: Blogaversary Posts — Tags: , , , , , , , , — fred @ 07:00

Back Study #1: Convex, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Today, March 15, 2010, this blog turns one year old.  (Above, the first illustration from the first post, “Variations”.)

I have long shared my work with others largely through underground, alternative, and community-based venues.  In many ways, the blog has been my ideal gallery – virtually cost-free, accessible to all both near and far, open 24 hours, a place where I can share the full range of my work, my process, and my passions, without concern for whether anyone will buy, or whether a dealer thinks I’m diluting my brand.

I have long tended to put all my energy into producing work, rarely finding the time to edit and present that work, much less to sell myself or promote my career.  Feeling the need to post something here once a week or thereabouts has been a much-needed self-imposed deadline for me!

I thank those of you that post comments.  A sense of dialog sustains me.  It’s also been gratifying to pick up some fans in far-flung places, where they would have been unlikely to encounter my work in an exhibit.

In reverse order, here’s a listing of the top ten posts from the first year of Drawing Life.  These are the posts that have gotten the most hits, continuing to attract readers after they’re no longer on the front page of the blog, with a sample image and quote from each.  The titles link back to the original posts.

10:  Opening the Closed Pose

“The human body is as expressive when it is turned inward as when it is expansive or active.  The guarded nature of the crouch or fetal position shows vulnerability in a different way than the open pose.  The upper and lower parts of the body are drawn together, and the energy pattern becomes circular rather than vertical.”

Hanging Head, 2009, by Fred Hatt

9:  Shapes of Things

This post featured stereoscopic photographs, presented as anaglyphs, to be viewed with red/cyan 3D glasses.

“The compositional dynamics of a flat photograph are simple, their impact immediate and graphic.  A stereo image is more complex.  Looking at it, we feel we are looking through a window, perhaps into a world that has been miniaturized and frozen in time.  The eyes caress the forms or penetrate the space of the image.  Enjoy these images, then go out and revel in the spatial complexity of the world.”

Framework, 1993, photo by Fred Hatt

8:  Fire in the Belly

“Body painting is an ancient art of transformation, to make the warrior more terrible, the young mate more enticing, or the shaman more of a dream creature.  I have used it as a medium of discovery, exploring the landscape of the body and finding the forces that lie beneath the surface.  In the type of body art shown here, there is never any preconceived design.  As the paintbrush follows the natural curves of the body, it becomes a kind of divining rod, finding the quality of energetic pools and flows and manifesting them in visible form.”

Botanic, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

7:  Painting with Light

“I first started experimenting with light painting in photography of models in 1990 or thereabouts . . . I was interested in the process because it bridged the gap between photography and painting or drawing.  As in painting, the image is created by manual gestures over a finite period of time, but instead of making pigment marks on paper or canvas, one makes light marks, through a lens, on a photograph.”

Smoke, 1996, photo by Fred Hatt

6:  Negative Space

“Clearly seeing negative space is about shifting the focus from presence to absence.  Finding the figure by looking at the negative space is one of the many artistic applications of the Hermetic principle  ‘As above, so below’ or ‘As within, so without’.  All reality exists on the cusp between interior and exterior, between past and future, or between any polarity you care to examine.  To draw is to surf on the points of contact.”

Stanley Folded, 2008, by Fred Hatt

5:  Anatomical Flux

This post featured drawings made at an artists’ sketch night event at “Bodies: The Exhibition”, a show of polymerized anatomical specimens.

“My favorite room in the exhibit is the one where blood vessels have been preserved and all the other tissues stripped away.  These figures look like my most manic scribbly drawings multiplied and exploded into three dimensions.  The arteries branch out treelike, the veins meander vinelike, and the capillaries are fuzzy like moss.  This quick sketch comes nowhere near the actual complexity of the specimen.”

Torse Vessels, 2009, by Fred Hatt

4:  The Spirit of Weeds

“In our uncertain time, everything seems to be breaking down.  Industrial civilization defines prosperity only as growth, but the limits to growth are looming everywhere . . . Such times will be hard for vast monocultures, and for hothouse flowers (and I do intend those as human metaphors).  Such times call for weedy spirits, for those that can find their earthly grounding even in the decaying manufactured world, and who burst with green power, determined to reassert the forces of life.”

Blue/Yellow/Green, 2002, photo by Fred Hatt

3:  Meanings of the Nude

“The image of the nude reminds us that we are our bodies, that sexuality and appetites and mortality are our very nature, and that the beauty of our animality cannot be separated from the beauty of our spirituality.”

Gustav Vigeland, figure from Vigeland Park, Oslo, c. 1930, photo by Simon Davey

2:  Pregnant Pose

“The roundness of the pregnant form is quite unlike the roundness of obesity.  The skin of the swelling belly and breasts is drum-tight.  The entire body is surging with life-force and all the muscles are toned.”

Fertile Structure, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

And finally – drum roll, please – the number one post, the one that went viral on StumbleUpon and got twice as many hits as any other individual post of Drawing Life in the past year:

1:  Visual Cacophony

“New York City is like the rainforest, dense with competing and coexisting lifeforms . . . This kind of visual excess has an energizing effect on me, like wild music that’s dissonant yet exuberant.”

Doll Window, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

Thanks to you, my readers, especially to the commenters, and stay tuned – I’m just getting started!

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress

Theme Tweaker by Unreal