DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2009/05/18

Anatomical Flux

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Anatomy — Tags: , , — fred @ 23:50
Facial Vessels, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Facial Vessels, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Last week I attended “Sketch Night” at “Bodies: The Exhibition“, at the South Street Seaport in New York.  This is one of those exhibits of real human cadavers, preserved by a process called plastination or polymer preservation, and variously dissected for educational display to the general public.  The Sketch Nights give artists access to the exhibit after hours for purposes of anatomical drawing and study.  The ticket price was a bit steep – more than twice as much as a session with a live model at Spring Studio.  There were introductory presentations by the Director of the exhibit and by well-known art and anatomy professor Sherry Camhy – very nice, but after all that a good chunk of the three-hour session was already used up.  We were allowed to go anywhere in the exhibit and choose the displays we wanted to sketch.  Most of the art students chose the full-body specimens showing skeletal and muscular systems (arranged mostly in corny sports poses), but I was more drawn to the exhibits that show the various patterns of flow in the body.  The drawing above was made from two separate pieces, one showing the veins of the face and head (in blue, as per the convention of anatomical illustration), and the other showing the arteries, in red.  I combined the two into one.

This is a sketch of the back of a full-body dissection showing the major nerves, which look tough and fibrous:

Nerves of the Back, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Nerves of the Back, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

Torso Vessels, 2009, by Fred Hatt

On some people the veins on the inner surface of the arm are close to the surface and make bulging pathways (not on my arms – I’m a phlebotomist’s challenge!).  Here’s an arm specimen that shows these veins clearly, with the mostly deeper-lying arteries.  In this image the palm of the hand is facing us:

Arm Vessels, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Arm Vessels, 2009, by Fred Hatt

There’s a room about embryology, with various specimens including placentas and conjoined twins, and a series of tiny translucent fetuses, with a red staining used to reveal bone development:

Fetal Bone Development

Fetal Bone Development, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Here’s the diaphragm, the dome-like muscle that aids in breathing.  Seen from the front at a low angle, it looked to me like an exotic caravan tent.  That’s the spine in the back:

Diaphragm, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Diaphragm, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Anatomy training for figurative artists tends to stop at bones and muscles and surface anatomy, but having an intuitive sense of the internal processes and flows can really enrich one’s feel for the body’s fantastically dynamic and complex structure.  Anatomy is an endless study – you’ll never know it all!

There’s one more “Sketch Night” scheduled this season at “Bodies: The Exhibition” in New York, this Thursday, May 21.

All drawings in this post are aquarelle crayon on gray paper, 70 cm x 50 cm.

NOTE:  Tomorrow I’m starting on a demanding freelance job, so I probably won’t find the time to make another blog post for at least a week.  Have patience – there will be more to come.

2009/05/07

Made the Cover

Filed under: My Work on Other Sites and in Print — Tags: , , — fred @ 10:32
American Artist Drawing, Spring 2009 cover

American Artist Drawing, Spring 2009 cover

Yes, that’s my portrait of Anna Marie on the cover of the Spring issue of Drawing magazine, available now at larger newsstands and bookstores and arts and crafts supply stores.  Painter, teacher and writer John A. Parks interviewed me and wrote the article, which occupies ten pages in the magazine and has thirteen illustrations.

Everybody says print media is dying, but I think that’s overblown.  I can tell you that my friends that have seen me in the magazine are far more impressed than they’ve ever been by seeing me or my work online!

The American Artist website put up a gallery of supplementary images that didn’t make the magazine, here.

I have to give props to the great model and blogger Claudia.  She featured my work several times on her very popular blog, Museworthy, thereby bringing it to the attention of American Artist.  Claudia writes about her own experiences as a professional artists’ model in New York City, and tells the story of historical artists and models.  Standard art history tends to ignore the role of models, but Claudia’s account puts the relationships at the center.

2009/05/02

Negative Space

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Poses — Tags: , , , , — fred @ 22:50
Curl, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Claudia Curl, 2008, by Fred Hatt

“Negative space” is what we call the parts of the picture around and between the primary subject.  In the image above, all the green and blue spaces are negative spaces.  Here, because the subject goes beyond all four edges of the paper, and there’s a hollow in the middle, we have a balanced set of five shapes, no two alike.  The bright color keeps them optically connected and emphasizes the pattern they form.  The drawing below is a similar pose and composition, but the forward bend of the body gives the negative spaces around it a less balanced, more active feel.  The hollow formed by the space between the front of the body and the arms and thighs is a more complex kind of negative space, with more distant parts of the body showing through the arch.

Grotto, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Lilli Grotto, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Negative spaces can be very useful in figuring out a pose on the page.  Doubles poses, for instance, are notoriously challenging to draw.  The spatial relationships are not just doubled, they’re multiplied.  Here’s an analytical sketch of a doubles pose.  You’ll notice an overall framing shape, lines showing the angular relationships between various points, and carefully delineated negative spaces, not just between the two bodies, but also between the contours of the bodies and the framing shape.  Clearly seeing the negative spaces can help an artist to overcome some of the confusion that comes of trying to see the parts of the body as we think they should be, rather than as they are.

Marianna & Emma, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Marianna & Emma, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Certain poses are challenging to draw because of multiple crossings of limbs, or foreshortening, or because they’re seen from up close or at an unusual angle.  Looking at the body itself can be quite confusing in these situations, but the negative spaces are simpler and their spatial relationship is clearer, so we can start from the negative spaces and then fill in the body details.

Stanley Folded, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Stanley Folded, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Jiri Twisted, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Jiri Twisted, 2009, by Fred Hatt

The negative space can be developed to suggest the three-dimensional environment of the model, as in the drawing below, where there is a close vertical plane on the right and a more distant vertical plane on the left.

Theresa by Corner, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Theresa by Corner, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Or the negative space can be elaborated as a sort of complement or mirror of the positive space.  In the drawing below, the folds in the fabric become almost biomorphic, reflecting the wrinkles and multiple roundnesses of the twisted feet.

Maria's Feet, 2007, by Fred Hatt

Maria's Feet, 2007, by Fred Hatt

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.

All drawings in this post are aquarelle crayon on paper, 50 x 70 cm.

2009/04/14

Composing on the Fly

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Developed Work — Tags: , , , , , — fred @ 20:41
Gaze Angle, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Gaze Angle, 2009, by Fred Hatt

This is one of my big black drawings, made about three weeks ago.  It’s 48″ x 60″, or 122 cm x 152 cm, aquarelle crayon on black paper cut from a large roll.  Excepting a little finishing work, this drawing was completed in one three hour session working from life with model Jessi.  I made some small warm-up drawings in a sketchbook at the beginning of our session, but didn’t directly use any of those in putting together the big piece.  There was no pre-planned composition.  I worked on the floor, sometimes crawling on top of the drawing, looking at my model on the other side of the studio.  All the overlapping figures are different poses of the same model.

I’ve made a number of these big drawings.  Sometimes they really work, and sometimes they fail, but when they do work the compositions have a vigor and a naturalness that I’ve never been able to achieve by deliberate design.

For this session, I photographed the work in progress whenever we took a break.  The “in progress” photos are a little rough.  You’ll see the weighted balls I use to hold the paper down, and in the first one the edge of my crayon box.  But they give some idea of how the work proceeds.

Stage 1, overlapping poses:

Gaze Angle, stage 1, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Gaze Angle, stage 1, 2009, by Fred Hatt

I started out by just asking Jessi to take different short poses of her own choosing for a few minutes at a time.  I sketched them with different colors, chosen arbitrarily, so when they overlap it would be possible to distinguish the lines of one figure from another.  By the time we took our first break there were five figures, already occupying most of the page.  I believe the figures were sketched working around the page in a clockwise direction, starting with the one on the lower right.   At this point I needed to stand up and get a sense of what was beginning to develop, and what possibilities remained in the still open spaces.  Jessi and I both looked at the piece and talked about what might come next.  These works are truly collaborations with the model!

Stage 2, establishing a center:

Gaze Angle, stage 2, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Gaze Angle, stage 2, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Only two additional figures were added in the second session, a sideways reclining pose in the upper half, and a kneeling figure with face upturned in the center.  That pose was selected specifically to fit the open space we noticed at the time of our first break.  I had also felt there was something interesting about the different heads facing in different directions.  A face looking upwards and another turned away seemed to add balance to this aspect of the composition.  I also liked the overlapping of hands and feet at the right center of the piece, and the juxtaposition of the four heads on the far left side with the roundness of shoulders, breast and thigh.

Stage 3, filling gaps:

Gaze Angle, stage 3, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Gaze Angle, stage 3, 2009, by Fred Hatt

During the third session, a foreshortened reclining figure was added to the largest remaining sparsely drawn area of the page.  Then two of the faces flanking that figure were developed.  They may have been looking a little lost in the increasing density and needed to be pulled forward.  The face just to the right of the center was given bright white eyes looking directly at the viewer of the drawing.  I think of that as a hook, a place to stop the eyes when they are swirling around in all the turbulence of the picture.  Some very linear body fragments were used to fill the two remaining “holes”.

Stage 4,  end of time working with model:

Gaze Angle, stage 4, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Gaze Angle, stage 4, 2009, by Fred Hatt

At this point we were running out of time.  At our last break I had noticed two areas that still felt a little undefined.  I’d seen Jessi with her face cradled in her hands, and this image seemed to add a nice bit of crisp detail, seen from two angles and left in a pure linear state, without shading.

Stage 5, finishing touches, days later:

Gaze Angle, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Gaze Angle (final), 2009, by Fred Hatt

After my session with Jessi was over I pinned the drawing up on the wall where I could walk past it and look at it over the next several days.  Finally, I made some finishing touches on it.  Not too much – It’s very easy to screw up a drawing like this by overworking it.  Just some background colors to bring out some parts of the figures that tend to get lost, and to separate and sharpen some of the facets.  There are also a few touches like the blue highlighting on the upper left and upper right faces, cross contours to give dimension to the elbow and hand in the upper left corner, and some development in the necks and collarbones near the center.

If you’re interested in other drawings made with this process, check out this gallery on my portfolio site.  I don’t know if anyone else works in a similar way – if you know of someone, let me know by leaving a comment.

This style developed out of my interest in capturing movement in drawing, and in working with the tension between order and chaos.  I noticed that my quick sketches had a great feeling of energy, but that energy was often diminished as a drawing became more finished.  I wanted to keep the spontaneity while increasing the complexity.  When hiring models for private work, I was compelled to do everything it was impossible to do in the regular group drawing sessions I attend. I can afford to hire models only occasionally, so I want to get my money’s worth!

For me, this process is about the magic of collaborating with Chaos.  I avoid preconceiving either the design or the theme.  As I wrote in one of my artist’s statements, “What is expressed in these works is not a concept or a personal feeling, but something unconceived, a spirit that emerges from the moment, from the interaction of artist and model and environment.”

I think I learned a lot from my brother Frank, a musician with a love for improvisation.  The key to improvising is to be fully engaged in the moment.  These drawings are one of my ways of practicing that vital spiritual discipline.

2009/03/30

Scrolls

Filed under: Movement Drawing: Performance Collaboration — Tags: , , , , , , — fred @ 16:35
KN scroll, 2000, by Fred Hatt

KN Scroll, 2000, 91 cm x 982 cm, by Fred Hatt

For several years I ran a “Movement Drawing” class at Minerva Durham’s Spring Studio.  It was like a life drawing class except we didn’t want the models to keep still.  Most of the models were dancers or performers.   Of course it’s very difficult to draw someone who’s dancing around at full speed, so we had several adaptations that helped us try to see and capture the movement we saw.  We had sets of extremely slow movement – different models had quite different interpretations of what constituted “extremely slow”!  We had sets of repeated movement:  the same gesture or movement phrase repeated over and over for five minutes at a time.  And we did “stop and go” sessions, in which the models moved freely and the artists could call for the action to freeze for a short time.

This was great practice because the only way to get anything was to draw as quickly as possible.  I experimented with crayons, graphite, and ink.  Using a brush with ink really seemed to have the right fluidity and responsiveness for the task, but ink brush drawing in a sketchbook doesn’t work so well as it takes too long to dry and the pages get stuck together.  So I had the idea of using scrolls.  I did many small scrolls about 6 feet (2 meters) long, usually vertical.  But I also made a few big scrolls, and that’s what I’m showing in this post.  All the scrolls shown here are 36″ or 91 cm across their short dimension, and 20 to 30 feet (6 to 10 meters) long.

Looking at the scroll above, it’s interesting how the style changes at different levels.  At the beginning (the top) the drawing is realistic, separate figures.  I’m drawing with a fan brush, which holds ink well and makes a single line when applied on its edge or a multiple line if used flat.  At the next level down the figures become denser and begin to overlap more.  Then they disintegrate a bit, becoming more abstract.  Perhaps the model’s movement was getting a bit faster here.  At this level there’s a fiery quality to the drawing.  Realism returns, with two large figures that have hair and even faces, but the more abstract and fragmented figures return and the scroll ends with a jumble of overlapping body parts and hands.  The last part of the scroll was done with a round brush, not the fan brush.

The remaining scrolls are horizontal, so you’ll have to scroll to the right to see them in full.

Patrick scroll, 2000, 91 cm x 1006 cm, by Fred Hatt

Patrick scroll, 2000, 91 cm x 1006 cm, by Fred Hatt

This one, and the others in this post, were drawn vertically from left to right.  This one’s also done with the fan brush, but the style and density is more uniform than in the vertical scroll.  If you look at it as a sequence it has the feeling of a dance.

The movement drawing classes attracted two very distinct types of artists.  There were the loose and flowy artists who didn’t really care about capturing the figure so much as picking up on the energy of the situation, and there were the animators, who tended to make series of small, crisply drawn figures like animation keyframes.  My own approach probably fell between those extremes.

Lauren scroll, 2000, 91 cm x 884 cm, by Fred Hatt

Lauren scroll, 2000, 91 cm x 884 cm, by Fred Hatt

This one was done with the round brush and a more precise, sculptural line.  It’s possible this one (immediately above) was done with still poses (stop and go session) and the previous one (the male figure scroll) with slow movement, but I don’t really remember.  The model for the one immediately above was Lauren, and the strength and variety of the poses you can see in this scroll is a great example of what a really superior model brings to their craft.

These last two examples were, I believe,  both drawn on the same day.  These are reproduced at a smaller scale so you can see more of the figures at once:

Flora scrolls, 2001, 91 cm x 762 cm and 91 cm x 610 cm, by Fred Hatt

Flora scrolls, 2001, 91 cm x 762 cm and 91 cm x 610 cm, by Fred Hatt

For a while I had a studio in the mezzanine of Gary Lai’s Physical Arts Center in Brooklyn.  This was a large studio, workshop space and performance venue for gymnastics, martial arts,  dance and aerial (trapeze) work.  It was the only place I ever had enough room to exhibit these large scrolls, along with many of the smaller ones.  You can see an image of the mezzanine space filled with such scrolls here.

In that huge space it was possible to get back and see these scrolls from a distance, something that couldn’t even be done when they were being made at Spring Studio or in my own small studio.  The dense clusters of figures can be seen as writhing torrents of multiple bodies, like Dante’s whirlwind of lovers from the Inferno, or sequentially, as phases of movement through time, which is how I tend to see them since that’s how they were made.  To me they are also reminiscent of the storms of bison and stags seen in Paleolithic cave murals.

The form of the scroll also suggests a momentum that will not be bounded by the tight frame of the regular page.  Perhaps the most famous modern-day work done in the form of a scroll is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, typed on a long roll of paper as though stopping to change paper was out of the question for such a barrelling headlong memoir.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress

Theme Tweaker by Unreal