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.

Mana Hashimoto in "Lullaby", 2009, video by Fred Hatt

Itsuki no komoriuta, or the Lullaby of Itsuki (a village on Kyushu Island, Japan), is one of the best-known Japanese folk melodies.  It will probably sound familiar to you even if you know nothing about traditional Japanese songs.  It’s been covered by many western musicians, including the French pop singer Claudine Longet and the Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell.  Here’s a lovely version in  a trembling, breaking voice style by Ikue Asazaki.

Dancer Mana Hashimoto, with whom I’ve previously collaborated several times, was inspired to explore this song in movement.  Mana describes Itsuki no komoriuta this way:  “Two centuries ago in Japan, it was common for poor families to sell their children, age six and up, to work for rich families as baby sitters or housekeepers. If the rich family were nice and open, the children might be allowed to go once in a while to visit their birth families, but often the children didn’t know when they would get to go home. Itsuki no lullaby is a song in the voice of a child missing her home town as she takes care of a rich family’s babies, putting them to bed.”

Norio Shimizu at lyricstranslate.com provides an excellent translation of the lyrics.  (“Bon” refers to the annual Buddhist festival to honor the spirits of the ancestors by dancing and by floating lanterns on the river.)

As soon as Bon arrives,
I will leave for my hometown.
The sooner Bon comes, the sooner I will go home.

I am no better than a beggar.
They are rich people.
With good sashes and good dresses.

Who will cry for me
When I die?
Only the locusts in the mountain behind the house.

No, it’s not locusts.
It’s my little sister.
Don’t cry, little sister, I will be worried about you.

When I am dead,
Bury me by the roadside.
The passers-by would lay flowers for me.

What flowers would they lay?
Cam-cam-camellias
The water would come falling down from above.

Mana was struck by the sad, forlorn mood of the lullaby, and by the beauty of its melody.  It appealed to her sympathies as a mother.  “I always want to find some hope,” she says, “to give those children some light.”

Mana Hashimoto in "Lullaby", 2009, video by Fred Hatt

Mana incorporated Itsuki no komoriuta into her full-length choreographed piece “Yumema/Dream Between”, which she has performed recently at Dixon Place and Green Space.  The film “Lullaby”, which I made with Mana two years ago, represents the beginnings of her engagement with the song, as she improvises movement while singing it.

This film was made in the Brooklyn loft of my friend Sullivan Walsh, a metal craftsman, who created the bed and oval mirror seen in the background.

Mana explores space by contact and by reaching out, often using tactile objects as a base for her movement.  Here, a long banquet table is her stage.  In the first part of the video she explores the melody of Itsuki no komoriuta through gesture and voice, bathed in the golden light of the setting sun.  In the second part, she restlessly tests the boundaries of her narrow stage in the deep blue twilight.

The video of “Lullaby” is embedded here.  If you receive the blog by email you will need to click to the blog site or follow this link to the Vimeo site for this video.

Mana will be performing a different piece this Saturday at a benefit for Japan earthquake relief at Tenri Cultural Institute in New York.

Hi Mizu Kaze – rebirth A fundraising event for Japan featuring gagaku and beyond

Featuring Mana Hashimoto (dance) // Sadahiro Kakitani (ryuteki) // Kaoru Watanabe (flute & taiko) with Daniel Abse (recitation) + Yoichi Fukui (sho) + Yuko Takebe (film)

Saturday, July 16, 2011, 7:30pm. $10 suggested donation. Tenri Cultural Institute, 43A West 13th St. (btwn. 5th & 6th Ave.), New York, NY, 10011, 212-645-2800, www.tenri.org

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

Two Candles, 1982, painting by Gerhard Richter

Today, March 15, 2011, marks the second anniversary of the launching of Drawing Life.  I’ll celebrate the occasion with the above image from the German painter Gerhard Richter, a fearless artist who sees no contradiction in pursuing both pure abstraction and photorealism, as well as some of the territory in between.

More fresh content is coming to this blog soon, I promise, but for today we’ll take a look back.

On the first anniversary a year ago I posted a Top Ten Countdown, featuring sample images and quotes from the most-read (or at least most-clicked-on – you can’t tell if people actually read them!) posts of the first year of Drawing Life.  This year’s countdown list, starting at #10 and ascending to first place, is as follows:

10: Body Electric:  Walt Whitman

Old man, seven photographs, c. 1885, photo by Thomas Eakins

9:  Textural Bodypaint

Marbled Belly, 1991, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

8:  Personal Painting

Green Moth, 2009, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

7:  Fire in the Belly

Bright Seed, 2000, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

6:  Reclining, Not Boring

Supine Arched (Madelyn), 2010, by Fred Hatt

5:  Pregnant Pose

SG and child pencil sketch 03, 2008, by Fred Hatt

4:  End-On:  Extreme Foreshortening

Strata, 2002, by Fred Hatt

3:  Womb of Art:  Paleolithic Masterpieces

Small paleolithic figurines, from left to right, vitreous rock from the Riviera, hematite from Moravia, mammoth ivory from Ukraine, and mammoth bone from Russia, figs. 121 thru 124 from The Way of the Animal Powers, by Joseph Campbell

2:  Drawing as Theater / Presence as Provocation:  Kentridge and Abramovic at MoMA

William Kentridge, Drawing for II Sole 24 Ore (World Walking), 2007; Charcoal, gouache, pastel, and colored pencil on paper, Marian Goodman Gallery

1:  Rhythmic Line

Lounging Ryan, 2008, by Fred Hatt

(You’ll notice that two posts, “Pregnant Pose” and “Fire in the Belly” appear in both this year’s and last year’s lists.)

It’s clear that the main determinants of high placement are 1) links from external sites, and 2) correspondence with popular search terms.  Perhaps re-promoting the posts that already get lots of hits is kind of pointless, like policies that help make the rich richer, but I’ve already done it, so I’ll just supplement it with a little affirmative action – a list of neglected posts, way down near the bottom of the rankings, that I still think might be worthy of your attention.

13 Ways:  Wallace Stevens

My suite of paintings illustrating Wallace Stevens’ classic poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”.  I painted this series in 1982, as a young artist just beginning to try to find an adult style.

Blackbird XII, 1982, by Fred Hatt

Light and Stone

Experiments in lighting, using as a model a stone sculpture by Thomas W. Brown.  I learned about lighting as a film student, but an understanding of how light behaves and interacts with objects is a deep subject of study for any kind of visual artist.  This post doesn’t go into all the complexities of light, but it seeks to show how changing the angle of light transforms how we see an object.

Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009, merge channels version

New Heads and Empathic Portraits

Two posts featuring my portrait work, including some of my favorite drawings.

Esteban, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Shadows and 3D or Not 3D

Two posts featuring my shadow-screen performance videos.  The key to my drawing and painting is its focus on energy and movement.  Here you’ll find me working directly with movement.

Still from "Convergence", 2010, video by Fred Hatt

I hope maybe these examples will persuade a few of my readers to go spelunking in the archives!  Happy birthday, Drawing Life – and readers, stay tuned for more images and ideas to come!  Thanks for reading, commenting, linking, sharing, “liking”, tweeting, and/or subscribing to the email feed.

Chuck 20101018a (crayon), by Fred Hatt

I fill up a sketchbook every couple of months with the quick (one minute to five minute) poses from the life drawing sessions I attend regularly.  I almost never exhibit or sell these pieces.  The sketchbook is a practice space.  I try different media, experiment with things like varying the scale or drawing shadows as contours, and I really don’t worry that some of the drawings fall flat or even crash and burn.  Sometimes I use a big sketchbook and sometimes a smaller one.  In the fall of 2010, I filled up two 18″ x 24″ (45.7 x 61 cm) spiral-bound sketch pads.  More recently, I’ve been using a smaller sketchbook, but when I looked back at the bigger ones I felt the fact that I could get multiple figures on a single page conveyed a sense of movement, of one pose flowing into the next, much more effectively than the smaller sketchbooks, where most of the poses are isolated one to a page.

In this post I’ll share some of those fall 2010 sketchbook pages.  Rather than discussing them individually, I’ll give the images in random order, with my thoughts interspersed.  Most of the words relate to the whole set of sketches, not just those directly above or below.

Adam 20101106c, by Fred Hatt

For me, a drawing can reproduce the form and structure of the body, the light and shadow, space and weight, with precision, and that can be beautiful.  But if a drawing captures the feeling of living energy or movement, now that’s exciting.  So I like to view a series of quick poses as a kind of dance performance.

Kuan 20100906q, by Fred Hatt

Most, maybe all, of the sketches in this post are from two-minute poses.  In a typical quick pose set, a model will perform ten two-minute poses of their own choosing.  Usually the monitor or supervisor of the session will call “Change,” at two minute intervals.  It’s like a dance, but instead of being performed in flowing movement, it’s composed of a series of held positions.

MichaelR 20101002b, by Fred Hatt

Many of the models are dancers or actors.  Others are visual artists themselves, or writers, musicians, athletes, bodyworkers, yogis.  Some of them have a deeper working knowledge of anatomy than do most of the figurative artists drawing them.

Betty 20100927c, by Fred Hatt

Some models want to express emotion, others want to show energy, to reveal structure, or to explore grounding and focus.

MichaelH 20100911b, by Fred Hatt

I don’t just look at the pose.  I watch the transitions even more intently.  In the way the model moves from one pose to the next you can see where in the body the energy is concentrated, where there is a push or a pull into the next pose.  The contours that express that impulse or that tension are the lines that make the drawing dynamic.

Maho 20100122b, by Fred Hatt

At the two drawing venues I attend regularly, Spring Studio and Figureworks Gallery, we’re fortunate to have a great variety of models, ranging in age from 18 to 90 or so, and in body type from emaciated to corpulent.  Our models also vary greatly in their personality and their approach to the job of modeling.

Kyle 20101115d, by Fred Hatt

I look for the characteristics that make each model unique.  This means focusing on specific curves and angles.  Some teachers of drawing urge an approach that simplifies and abstracts the body structures, but too much abstraction makes all the figures generic.  It’s much more interesting to be as specific as possible.

Jiri 20101122c, by Fred Hatt

Each model has particular qualities.  The model above has long, angular limbs and a face that reaches forward with intensity.  The one below has an elegant torso that is all parabolic curves, with a beautiful bowlike collarbone.

Vassilea 20101206b, by Fred Hatt

In The Natural Way to Draw, Kimon Nicolaides teaches a method of learning figure drawing that starts from two seemingly opposite exercises – scribbly, spontaneous “gesture” drawing, and slow, painstaking “contour” drawing.  When you get more practiced, you begin to understand that every contour has a gestural expressive aspect, and every gestural marking has its own contour, so these extremes meet and merge.

Shizu 20100918b, by Fred Hatt

I often let the figures spill off the edges of the page.  The sketches can look more dynamic that way, and it is often more interesting to capture more detail in the most dynamic part of the pose than to spend that time dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, so to speak.  But the direction of the head, and of the hands and feet, can be an important part of what makes the pose expressive.

Chuck 20101018c (crayon), by Fred Hatt

Some models like to act out scenes or perform actions, either everyday ones or dramatic ones.

Adam 20101106d, by Fred Hatt

Some models come out of one pose completely and then go into a completely different next pose, while others treat the transition from one pose to the next as a flow, perhaps keeping part of the body anchored while another part changes direction.

Ellen 20101129b (pen), by Fred Hatt

Some models are students of the history of figurative art, and derive their poses from what they’ve seen in the work of Caravaggio, Rubens, or Rodin.

Yisroel 20101011b, by Fred Hatt

Some models take casual poses, varying attitudes or presentations of the balanced body.

Carmen 20101030d (ink brush), by Fred Hatt

Other models like to use quick poses to explore their limits of stretching or balancing, taking poses that are highly challenging to hold even for one or two minutes.

Elizabeth 20100920a, by Fred Hatt

Poses that twist or reach into open space tend to untwist or droop a bit, even in just a minute or two.  Many of the classic poses involve bracing one part of the body against another or against a wall or support, to ensure stability.

Shizu 20101113a, by Fred Hatt

Most models have a repertory of poses that they use frequently.  Most have a consistent style or feeling that is maintained through a whole set of long poses.  When the feeling or type of pose changes radically from one to the next, a multi-pose page looks less like a record of the flow of movement, and more like a scene with more than one character.

Sue 20101025c, by Fred Hatt

A set of quick poses usually reveals more of the particular character of a model than a long pose does.  It’s not possible for a model to really push limits or put intense energy into a long pose.  Quick poses are a performance, a gift of energy to the artist.  I always feel that I must give total focus and intensity to this exercise.  Like most of the good things in life, a quick pose must be savored in the moment, because it can’t last long!

Ellen 20101129c (pen), by Fred Hatt

All of these sketchbook pages are 18″ x 24″, and all were made between September and December of 2010.  All are done in pencil unless otherwise noted.