Figures Archives - Page 18 of 22 - DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2010/01/07

B-Sides

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Anatomy — Tags: Anatomy, Art Modeling, Crayons, Figures, Nudes — fred @ 20:14

Robust, 1998, by Fred Hatt

The front of the body has most of the major focal points, so we tend to think of the back as secondary and less interesting. We tend to want to face others, so the back of the body is unseen, like the far side of the moon. Here’s a selection of my drawings of nude backs from over the years, making the case for the beauty and power of the human back.

Compact, 2004, by Fred Hatt

Triangular, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Violon d'Ingres, 1997, by Fred Hatt

Look at the variety in these backs. They convey personality even without a face or an action pose. The anatomy of the back is a complex structure of curved and triangular bones and muscles, but it’s hidden underneath the skin, so the landmarks can be elusive.

Most of these more finished drawings have been done at the three-hour long pose session at Spring Studio. I’ve been the monitor (supervisor) at one of these weekly sessions for at least thirteen years. There are always artists that want to draw portraits at these sessions, so nearly all the poses are more or less frontal. The studio is set up with drawing stations on three sides of the stand, so sometimes it’s possible to get a back view by going all the way to the side. The light is usually coming from in front of the model, so the back is often in shadow, illuminated by light reflecting back from the colored fabric backdrops, as in these examples:

Prism, 1998, by Fred Hatt

La Reina, 2009, by Fred Hatt

The back of the body can convey the mood, attitude, and style of a person:

Afar, 2000, by Fred Hatt

Fan, 2004, by Fred Hatt

Burlyman, 2004, by Fred Hatt

As the great majority of the body’s nerves branch out from the spinal cord, the energy impulses that travel through the body are close to the surface of the back. I sometimes draw to help me visualize the energy I can sense in someone’s body:

Energy Fields, 2002, by Fred Hatt

Backlines, 2001, by Fred Hatt

Back with Projections, 2006, by Fred Hatt

The back is also the center of movement in the body. Mana Hashimoto, the blind dancer I’ve worked with on several performance projects, leads classes in “Dance Without Sight”. When I took the class, Mana showed us how to follow another person’s movement by lightly touching them. A hand on the middle of the back can detect every major movement of the body, including those of the extremities. There is no other place to put the hand that works as well.

Crawling, 2002, by Fred Hatt

Leaning Back, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Blades and Curves, 2007, by Fred Hatt

Ankle Grasp, 2003, by Fred Hatt

Five more pictures fill out the post – explorations of the beautiful possibilities of the second side of the body:

Chair Back, 2001, by Fred Hatt

Curvaceous, 2004, by Fred Hatt

Dorsal Contours, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Press, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Squat, 2009, by Fred Hatt

These drawings are all aquarelle crayon on paper, 50 cm x 70 cm or 18″ x 24″ or close to those sizes. Most of them were made during life drawing sessions at Spring Studio, Project of Living Artists, or Figureworks Gallery.

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2009/12/07

Light and Stone

Filed under: Photography: Light,Sculpture — Tags: Collaborations, Figures, Sculpture, Technique, Thomas W Brown — fred @ 00:02

Thomas W. Brown, installation at Art Students' League, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt

Thomas William Brown is an art therapist and a stone carver. Many of his works, like those seen above in a detail from an installation of sculptures shown in an exhibit last year at the gallery of the Art Students’ Leage of New York, are based on architectural motifs. When he talks about his process, Tom speaks of finding forms through carving that already reside within the stone. Tom gave me one of his pieces, an abstract shape evocative of a female torso in brown alabaster. Recently I used this sculpture as a photographic model, to experiment with lighting.

One way of seeing a three dimensional form is to look at it from different angles. In fact this is the way sculptors work, and observational figurative sculptors even have rotating platforms for their models and for their work in progress. Artists working in two dimensions, with drawing or painting, rely on light and shadow to perceive and depict the three dimensional form of a figure or object.

I studied filmmaking in college, and we spent considerable time learning about the qualities of light and how to use lighting to reveal form and create moods. Artists that draw and paint study light by observation, but rarely is it part of their learning practice to place, manipulate, and modify sources of light. For anyone interested in learning about light from this hands-on perspective, Ross Lowell’s book, Matters of Light and Depth, is an excellent, simple yet thorough, introduction.

To see how changing the lighting changes the appearance of Tom’s sculpture, all these photos are taken from the same angle. Here is the piece with a strong light from up high and to the right:

Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009 #1

This lighting certainly highlights the sculpture’s resemblance to a female torso with a contrapposto tilt. The highlights and shadows seem to convey the familiar forms of breasts and a belly. The light here is from a bare bulb, giving crisp, sharply defined shadows. In the next version, the light is in the same place, but it is diffused through a large white umbrella:

Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009 #2

The light striking the sculpture is coming not from a small point but from a broad area. It’s a bit like the difference between the light on a sunny day and the light on an overcast day. Highlights and shadows are softened, with smooth gradual transitions between light and dark areas. The softer light seems to bring out the beautiful subtleties in the color of the stone. Next, a hard light from the right:

Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009 #3

Every change in the angle of the light reveals different aspects of the shape of the sculpture, just as looking at if from different points of view would do. Here, the protrusions that we saw as belly and hip bone could be seen as the back of a head with longish hair and a shoulder of another figure with its back turned to us.

Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009 #6

The shot above has the light high and to the left side of the sculpture. In this lighting, what I originally saw as a breast now appears as a rather feline face, while the upper bulge of the belly becomes the feline figure’s shoulder. The curve on the left, that we initially saw as the transition from ribs to hip, becomes the neck and chest of this newly discovered creature.

Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009 #7

In the version above, the light source is reflected from a white surface on the floor beneath the platform where the sculpture rests. The diffuse nature of the light, and its unconventional low angle nearly eliminate the kind of form-revealing shadow cues seen in the first photos of the piece. Here I am struck by the color variations we can see in the stone. There are veins of deep red, warm pink and cool gray. With the form flattened, the color can almost be seen as a painting.

Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009 #9

In the final example I’ve chosen to show here, there are two light sources, one on either side of the sculpture and slightly behind it. This lighting allows the front of the piece, which might naturally dominate our attention, to be shadowy, while the edges are shown with great clarity.

To conclude this post, here’s a Photoshop experiment. The versions above labeled as #1, #3, and #6 were converted to grayscale, and then each one was used as one of the color channels for a RGB image using Photoshop’s “merge channels” function. Don’t worry if you don’t understand that. The effect is essentially the same as if the sculpture were lit by three different colored lights, a green one from the right, a blue one from the left, and a red one from up high and slightly to the right.

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

I thank Tom for letting me experiment with his work this way. It’s good work that seems initially simple, but reveals hidden aspects when explored in more depth!

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2009/12/01

The Mind is an Antenna

Filed under: Art and Philosophy — Tags: Art Modeling, Crayons, Figures, Nudes, Philosophy — fred @ 00:24

Crystalize, 2000, by Fred Hatt

A long time ago, someone taught me a simple way of meditation. I was told that thoughts would come, and I should let them go. You can’t stop the thoughts coming, but you can choose not to pick up on them or follow them, to just let them come and let them go. I was taught to focus on the breath coming in and out, to give the mind a simple physical point of attention so that thoughts would not become a central thread.

Thoughts did come, of course. The experience was like sitting on a city park bench, listening to fragmentary snatches of conversation from the people passing by. Most of the thoughts were incomplete or nonsensical. Many were intriguing. If I had chosen to follow them, I could have spun threads of thinking, feeling, or narrative out of them. But I chose to let them go, so they remained disjointed fragments.

I’ve had this experience many times since then. Over time, I have come to believe that the mind does not originate these thoughts, but that thoughts exist in some impersonal mind-field and the mind just perceives them. The mind is sensing thoughts, not generating them. Of course, the mind is not just a sensor, but also a processor, so if you latch onto a thought you can build it into a structure using all the cognitive tricks: emotion, metaphor, narrative, logic. But the seed-thoughts, I believe, come into the mind from outside.

Projection, 1998, by Fred Hatt

Our sense of a coherent self arises from the flow of our sensations, thoughts, and memories. We identify with what we have experienced and what we think. But all of that is really external. Although it is our only way of perceiving ourselves, it is not ourselves. It is simply the medium through which we move, as water is the medium in which a fish swims.

The world contains every possible kind of sensory input, every kind of experience, all the time. It is a liberation to realize that we have some control over what aspects of this omnisensorium we choose to give our attention to. When we pay attention to horror, the threading aspect of the mind will lead us to perceive more and more horror. Likewise if we choose to focus on beauty or joy or humor. In terms of thoughts, all kinds of thoughts are in the field at all times.

Like radio waves, many streams of thought are passing through us simultaneously, most of them unperceived. If we don’t know how to tune our antenna, we are most likely to pick up the loudest signals, the million megawatt superstations. Unfortunately those signals are mostly vacuous drivel and unfocused emotional urges. Finding the golden strands in the stream of muck depends on learning to withdraw attention from the loudest and most sensational things so we can give our attention to quieter, subtler things.

Ourania, 1997, by Fred Hatt

The drawings in this post are aquarelle crayon on paper, 18″ x 24″ (46 x 61 cm).

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2009/11/09

Redrawing

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Process — Tags: Art Modeling, Crayons, Figures, Nudes, Portraits, Process, Technique — fred @ 00:23

Soft Angles 1 (detail), 2009, by Fred Hatt

Readers have told me they like posts that show my process, even though this means posting drawings I’d never exhibit. I remember as a child seeing an art book that had a series of black-and-white photographs showing multiple stages of Henri Matisse’s reworking of a painting of a seated woman in a long dress. This revealing of painting as a process had a lasting impact on my way of understanding art. I wasn’t able to find this image sequence on the web, but if anyone knows where it is, leave a comment and I’ll insert the link here.

I’m the monitor (non-instructing artist in charge) of a long-pose figure drawing session every Monday morning at Minerva Durham’s legendary Spring Studio in New York. We start with a set of ten two-minute quick poses to warm up, then the model takes a long pose for the rest of the session, twenty minutes at a time with breaks. We have time for five and a half of these sets of the same pose.

I work quickly, so if I get off to a good start I can do a pretty developed piece during one of these sessions, like this example. But sometimes my less-finished drawings are more lively and interesting, and I’m sure I’ve lost some good preliminary drawings by overworking them. So sometimes I’ll do more than one drawing during the session. I could try more than one viewing angle, or a portrait and a full figure, or I could vary the technique or the scale. And sometimes I keep starting over because I’m having trouble getting it. I have found that once you’ve gone too far down the wrong road it’s better to start fresh than to try to fix it.

The subject of the highly finished example linked in the paragraph above is Claudia, professional artist’s model and the blogger behind Museworthy. She was our model Monday morning at Spring Studio last week, and so, between her blog and mine you’ll be able to see multiple aspects of that single drawing session. My sketches from that session’s two-minute warm-up poses are on Museworthy here, and in another Museworthy post you can see Jean Marcellino‘s lovely refined pencil drawing from the session.

I decided to do multiple drawings at this session, always from the same angle. Claudia gave us a pose with a lot of interesting angles. Here’s my sketch from the first twenty-minute set:

Soft Angles 1, 2009, by Fred Hatt

This sketch shows how I start out analyzing the pose and composing it on the paper. I first sketched very loosely and lightly in white crayon. You can see it was too far to the left to look balanced on the page, so I redrew the pose a bit further right. I was figuring out the three triangular negative spaces (in orange), the bounding shape (in jade green), the convex forms and highlights (ovals and curves in white and yellow), the creases and deep shadows (blue), and the flow of muscle and bone forms.

After having studied all the visual aspects of the pose in the first set, I started again in the second set. I scaled up a bit for a tighter composition and was able to depict the pose in cleaner, more economical lines:

Soft Angles 2, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Here there’s just a rough sketch in orange, with dark edges and the outlines of shadows done in dark blue, and bright edges and highlight centers in white. This is the type of composition I generally prefer, with the body extending past the edges of the paper on all four sides. This sketch would be a perfect basis for a highly finished full-color drawing, but perhaps this simpler stage of the work is more interesting as it is.

For the third twenty minute set, starting again, I scaled up even more, to larger-than-life, focusing on Claudia’s face:

Soft Angles 3, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Here I’m working out the three-dimensional structure of the face, looking at light and shadow to separate it into curved surfaces. In this rough twenty minute form, it’s a bit exaggerated, like a caricature. It looks slightly too angular, and makes her look older than she does in reality. If I had worked further on this as a portrait it would have become softer and warmer, the expression less angry and more pensive.

After the third twenty minute set, we had a longer break, and then returned for two and a half more sets. I started again, scaling back down to the full figure, and worked on the next one for two sets, or forty minutes:

Soft Angles 4, 2009, by Fred Hatt

I’ve returned to the analytical mode as at the beginning, extending the lines of the form to see how they intersect. But here I’m developing the roundedness of the form and its relation to its background. But is the head too big? The legs too short? The face is definitely not quite right. It looks sad and angry, which is not really the feeling I’m getting. At the last break I decide to start over once again, even though the final set will only be twelve minutes. I’ve spent all this time looking at planes and angles, light and shadow, but so far I’ve failed to capture the feeling. Maybe I’m finally warmed up.

Soft Angles 5, 2009, by Fred Hatt

By this time I know the pose intimately. Perhaps I can simplify my drawing, getting the essence, letting all the complexity fall away. I stay away from the overpowering white crayons, using a cool blue and yellow-green for the highlights, and two reds for the dark edges. Time’s up! This experiment is concluded.

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2009/10/30

Opening the Closed Pose

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Poses — Tags: Anatomy, Art Modeling, Crayons, Figures, Nudes, Portraits — fred @ 03:08

Spinous Process, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Some figurative artists dislike “closed” poses, and complain when the models take these positions. They may feel the models are shutting them out. The face and soft frontal torso are hidden, and the back becomes a protective shell, as in the defensive balling-up of a hedgehog or armadillo, or a turtle retreating into its shell. But this kind of pose often conveys emotional qualities and presents the body in abstract forms of great beauty and complexity.

Taoist subtle anatomy sees the front of the body and the inside of the limbs as yin (soft or receptive) and the back and outside as yang (hard or active). The fetus develops curled in this egglike position, with its soft parts protected inside. The fetal position can be experienced as a comforting return to that contained and nourished state. In yoga, it is called the child’s pose, and is one of the primary restorative or relaxed positions.

Balasana, 1996, by Fred Hatt

Many people sleep in a curled-up position. A pop-psych analysis says, “Those who curl up in the foetus position are described as tough on the outside but sensitive at heart. They may be shy when they first meet somebody, but soon relax. This is the most common sleeping position, adopted by 41% of the 1,000 people who took part in the survey. More than twice as many women as men tend to adopt this position.” Most sleepers curl up on their sides, as seen from three angles in the following three sketches:

Sleep Fold, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Bony Points, 2004, by Fred Hatt

Asleep, 2004, by Fred Hatt

This kind of pose presents a variety of juxtapositions and foreshortenings, depending on the angle of view. I’ve often been inspired to bring more than one aspect into a drawing, as in the one below. Here the same side-curled pose is seen from three points of view in superimposed outlines, one in red, one in green, and one in blue, with some sculptural development:

Triple Angle Curl, 2000, by Fred Hatt

In the next two examples, the body is shown as seen directly and in a mirror reflection, bringing out the landscape-like qualities of the body in space:

Reflection, 2000, by Fred Hatt

Mountain Mirrored, 1998, by Fred Hatt

The curled-up position can bring out anatomical forms of great beauty, in ways they wouldn’t otherwise be seen, as with the muscles of the shoulders and back here:

Serrate, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Or the shoulder cleft here:

Hanging Head, 2009, by Fred Hatt

It can reveal complex networks of negative spaces:

Curved Triangular, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Or fresh perspectives and unusual spatial progressions:

Oblique, 1996, by Fred Hatt

The closed pose is not always a simple ovoid structure.

Angular Equipoise, 2001, by Fred Hatt

Positions with the head down or even with the face hidden are not necessarily guarded or concealed, but may express emotional states.

Elbow Knee, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Headrest, 2005, by Fred Hatt

The crouching figure can suggest darkness and brooding:

Tight Crouch, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Brooding, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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.

All the newer drawings in this post are 50 cm x 70 cm, aquarelle crayon on paper. The drawings from 2001 and earlier are the same medium but may be a bit smaller.

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DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2010/01/07

B-Sides

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2009/12/07

Light and Stone

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2009/12/01

The Mind is an Antenna

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2009/11/09

Redrawing

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2009/10/30

Opening the Closed Pose

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