Movement Drawing Archives - Page 3 of 7 - DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2012/09/09

The Doodle Abides

Filed under: Abstract Art,Dance — Tags: Abstract, Authentic Movement, Dance, Doodles, Ink Brush, Movement Drawing, Philosophy, Process — fred @ 23:59

Nature Boy, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I drew this this morning after a session of Authentic Movement. It’s a kind of moving meditation, a group practice of discovering the impulses to movement within your body, following them wherever they lead you, and responding in the moment. The practice called Authentic Movement was developed in the 1950’s by Mary Starks Whitehouse, a student of choreographers Mary Wigman and Martha Graham, and developed in later decades by Janet Adler, Joan Chodorow, and others. My friend Peter Honchaurk, who studied the form with Adler, introduced me to it twenty years ago, and ever since then it’s been one of my essential practices. Nowadays I’m part of a peer group of Authentic Movers, and we meet once a month in Prospect Park in Brooklyn to move and witness together. Many people treat the practice as a form of somatic therapy, but for me it’s always been most essentially a way to stay in touch with the creative spirit that resides in the body and in the relationship between the inner world and the world outside.

The drawing above is an expression of the connection with elemental energies that I felt moving in the park. The remainder of the pictures in this post will consist of a collection of my doodles, most of which are done while at work, riding transportation, or talking on the phone, not in connection with Authentic Movement practice. Illustrations are in random order, so the relation of text to images is mostly coincidental. (Earlier posts on the art of doodling are here and here.)

Score for Solo Dance, 2011, by Fred Hatt

In Authentic Movement we usually move with eyes closed. For a person like me, extremely visually oriented and, if not quite intellectual, at least mental, consciousness tends to reside mainly in the head, with the body serving as the vehicle to move the head around in the world. When the eyes are closed, awareness naturally shifts downward into the body. Eyes-closed orientation relies not on visual cues, but on contact with the ground or floor. Proprioception and tactility supplant visual/intentional navigation.

Analysis, 2011. by Fred Hatt

If you’ve followed this blog for a while you may have gleaned a central theme, that I treat visual art as an art of movement, like music or dance.

Curandero, 2011, by Fred Hatt

All organic forms, the bodies of plants, animals, and people, the shapes of clouds and of the land, emerge from dynamic processes of movement and growth.

Generative S;iral, 2012, by Fred Hatt

To draw is to feel form back into the movement from which it arises.

Forest Runner, 2011, by Fred Hatt

You can get to know a landscape by roaming about it, feeling its texture with the soles of your feet and its contours as gravity reveals them to you.

Floor Plan for a Happy Drunk, 2012, by Fred Hatt

A blank piece of paper is a fairly homogenous landscape, so roaming about it with a brush or pen or pencil is an exploration of the hills and valleys of your mind more than of the paper.

Cogitation/Constipation, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Authentic Movement takes place within a space defined by the “witnesses” who observe the “movers”, and with their attention create a protected circle where the magic can happen. A doodle happens in a space defined by the edges of the paper provided for it.

Mountain Mouth, 2012, by Fred Hatt

The doodle grows into the two-dimensional space of the paper as a growing houseplant expands within the space contained by its pot.

Bacterium, 2011, by Fred Hatt

If you’re dancing in a space, of course you can keep going back and forth over the same little patch. When you’re making marks, you have to keep moving into territory that hasn’t been marked yet, as a plant’s roots must penetrate the as-yet unoccupied dirt.

Wreckage, 2011, by Fred Hatt

In movement or in drawing or doodling, you are always responsive to sensory input. Marks or gestures may arise from internal impulses of nerves or emotions or imagination, or they may come from hearing a bird or feeling the wind.

French Curves, 2012, by Fred Hatt

This approach eschews concepts and plans. There is no preconceived idea one is trying to portray. There is simply a flow of moments, shapes that flow into other shapes, images and impulses arising in the mind, in the body, or in the world.

Treasure Map, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Of course, shapes are seen as things, and the imagination picks up images and runs with them, so free improvisatory doodling or moving is not necessarily strictly nonobjective, but I try to keep representational elements ambiguous, so that I retain the freedom to reinterpret them.

Old King Lear, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Most of these doodles are made without any particular idea in mind, but once they’re done it is much easier to come up with descriptive titles than it is for my figurative drawings. There is nothing like mindless abstract movement to inspire the imagination!

Stiff Salute, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Organic movement is all about curves and spirals, meanders and branches, echoes and fractals.

Fleurs du Mal, 2012, by Fred Hatt

How does electricity move? How does blood flow?

Tesla, 2012, by Fred Hatt

How do a flower’s petals unfold? How do a tree’s limbs reach out and out, penetrating a space of air?

Pagoda of the Hairy Eyeball, 2011, by Fred Hatt

How do you slip on the ice? How does water carve a canyon?

Man on Wire, 2011, by Fred Hatt

How does the wind wriggle through a gap? How does a weed expand a crack in concrete?

Bird Lizard Blizzard, 2011, by Fred Hatt

How do dividing cells accrete into a spine? How does heat make light ripple in air?

Water Cycle, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Why do arteries look like trees? Why do trees look like lightning? Why does a river delta look like a tree?

Jazz Hands, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Why does the large scale structure of the universe look like neurons?

The Devil Toupée, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I want the movement of the hand to reflect the natural movement of growing things.

Writhing T-square, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I want the movement of the hand to reflect the movement of the mind.

Cul-de-Sac Subdivision, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I want a drawing to grow like a plant grows.

Indomitable Weed, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I want random things to come into the drawing just as random things enter into any experience, any environment in the world.

Museum of Maladaptive Mutations, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I want to create not by fiat, but by adaptation.

Shaft, 2012, by Fred Hatt

The movement of the mind does not stand apart from the world. Like the movement of the body, it happens only within a world that has forces and pressures and countercurrents and resistance. To make is to engage.

Thorny Vessels and Tricky Steps, 2012, by Fred Hatt

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2012/07/27

Cut to the Quick

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Quick Poses — Tags: Anatomy, Art Modeling, Dance, Figures, Ink Brush, Movement Drawing, Nudes, Process, Sketch, Technique — fred @ 19:32

Julio Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

As the 2012 Olympic Games get underway in London, we’ll have an opportunity to observe the elegance and power of the human body in action, diverse kinds of bodies honed through intensive training for different skills. Here I salute the occasion with my own studies of the body from figure drawing sessions at Figureworks Gallery in Brooklyn and Spring Studio in Manhattan. All of these sketches are made with watercolor and brush during sequences of two-minute poses. The illustrations are presented in random order, and the interspersed text is not specifically related to the adjacent images, but generally to the whole collection.

Alley Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

A sequence of quick poses is a kind of dance, as the model moves from one position to another to reveal the anatomical structure and the expressive range of the body. The artist has only a moment to capture whatever can be captured. I am fascinated by the variety and dynamism of quick poses – the models can do all sorts of things that would be impossible or painful to hold for even a five or ten minute pose. Knowing that the timer is relentlessly counting down, I enter into a mode of hyperfocused flow, my eyes and my brush both in constant and coordinated motion. The only way to get anything interesting is to work with swift efficiency.

Gwen Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Here I’m posting complete sequences, so you’ll see some awkward passages as well as some lovely bits of brushwork that reveal something true of the model’s aliveness or individuality. Every real brushstroke is a rough approximation of the ideal brushstroke into which the visual cortex is translating the forms it perceives. I’ve been practicing this for many years, so my approximations are pretty good when my focus is on. It’s more important that the lines be confident and expressive than that they be accurate. If I were to stop to measure or take a moment to step back and look critically at the sketch, I would hardly be able to get anything at all in two minutes. I have to go unhesitatingly with the flow, and trust the flow.

Pedro Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I look for curves – the curve of the spine, of the hip, of the neck, of the knee, and make each curve a stroke of the brush. I try to emphasize what makes each individual body unique, not to genericize the anatomy. That uniqueness is in the curves. The curve of one person’s hip is quite different from that of another’s hip. I always look for the physical idiosyncracies.

Crolie Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I generally omit or radically simplify faces, hair, hands and feet. Those parts of the body are detail traps, best saved for more leisurely studies. But they are also often key to the particular expression of a pose or model, so I try to get some indication of their angles. The direction of a gaze, the splay or curl of the fingers, the twist of an instep can be the detail that makes the pose come alive in the sketch. For me, angles and curves are practically the whole of quick drawing.

Eric Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Quick poses are a special exchange of energy between model and artist. A set of quick poses gives the model an opportunity to perform, to stretch out, to test their limits, to offer contrasts of feeling or form. As the artist, I cannot let such a gift go unappreciated. When a model is really giving the energy, drawing is like dancing with a fantastically graceful or dynamic partner – complete abandon is the only appropriate response.

Claudia Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

A kind of time dilation can occur during quick poses. From my own experience as a model, I can tell you that holding a challenging pose can make two minutes seem like an eon. For the artist, a pose that’s complicated to draw can make two minutes feel like a few seconds.

James Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Observing angles is a quick way to see how one thing relates to another thing in space. When I’m doing quick sketches, I’m making lots of lines that I don’t draw. In my mind, I make lines between points to see how they relate in space. I check the angle going from nipple to nose, or from fold of elbow to bulge of heel, or from where the arm meets the leg to the pubic ridge. When all of those parts are in the right angular relations to each other in space, proportions will be a fair approximation of the reality.

Robyn Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Sometimes it’s easier to see curves and shapes and angles by looking at the negative spaces, the places where the body is not, and how those places relate to each other. Or the angles of the body may become clearer by seeing them in relation to straight lines such as a wall or surface, the pole the model holds or the wall on which he leans.

Adam Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I’ve pored over anatomy books, assimilating as much structural understanding of the body as I can, but I depict only details I can see. The knowledge helps me to grasp these features of the body, but I can’t get lost in an analytical breakdown of the body. I try to get as many anatomical details into the sketches as I can, because these details individualize the body.

Tin Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Curves and angles, negative spaces, spatial relationships, anatomical details, flow and rhythm – it’s a lot to see and a lot to try to depict in two minutes. The only way to do it is to merge perceiving and drawing into a unified process. This is achieved by trying and trying and refining through hundreds of hours of practice.

When you watch an Olympic gymnast, you are seeing someone who has developed a perfect unity of perception and action through relentless practice. Drawing is more subjective, but the learning process is similar. All the details have to come together, to become one act.

Claire Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

All of the original sketches in this post are made with watercolor and a brush in 18″ x 24″ sketchbooks. Multiple pages have been stacked vertically in the illustrations so a whole series of quick poses appear in a single image, as though the drawings were made on a scroll. Action sketches actually made on scrolls, drawn by me more than a decade ago, can be seen in this post. I have also written previously about the similarities between life drawing practice and athletic practice, here.

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2012/07/04

Different Strokes

Filed under: Art History,Collections of Images,Top Ten — Tags: Art & History, Figures, Landscape, Movement Drawing, Nature, Nudes, Portraits, Sketch, Technique — fred @ 00:38

Porcupine, 1951, woodcut by Leonard Baskin

The magic of drawing or printmaking is in the strokes. By strokes I mean the particular and idiosyncratic quality of the lines or other marks the artist makes. Some lines jab while others meander. Some markings are cloudy while others are crisp. The strokes convey in a tactile way the essence of how the artist comes to grips with the challenge of capturing a thing seen or actualizing an inner vision. Making a drawing is a journey of exploration, and these markings are the spoor of the trek. When we look at a drawing, we can feel the energy that went into it in the particular flavor of its lineaments.

In this post I present a goodly selection of mostly monochrome sketches and prints by a wide diversity of masterly mark-makers. I’ll let the works speak for themselves and leave it to you to contemplate the contrasts among them. I have generally chosen pieces with a direct, spontaneous quality, avoiding highly finished styles where the quality of line may be more a matter of design than of the energy of the mind and the hand. I often tried to find unfamiliar examples of the work of well-known artists, and sometimes individual works that are not representative of the artists’ familiar styles. I think you’ll be particularly surprised by the early De Kooning sketch!

Man Walking in a Field, 1883, conte crayon drawing by Georges Seurat

Portrait, title, date and medium unknown, by Paul Cadmus

Composition, 1916, medium unknown, by Wassily Kandinsky

Edward Scissorhands, 1990, pen and pencil drawing by Tim Burton

Autumn, 1970, engraving by Salvador Dalí

Self Portrait, 1946, by David Alfaro Siqueiros

Musician portrait, date, title, and medium unknown, by Edgar Degas

Drawings, 1939, title and medium unknown, by Jackson Pollock

Saturn, 1516, engraving(?) by Hans Baldung Grien

Resting Woman Wearing Tiara, 1936, pen and ink drawing by Henri Matisse

Sketchbook pages, date unknown, drawings by R. Crumb

Reproduction Drawing III (after the Leonardo cartoon), 2010, media unknown, by Jenny Saville

Self Portrait at the Age of Eighty-Three, 1843, ink brush drawing by Hokusai

Untitled, 1981, drawing by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Study for the Head of Leda, 1506, ink and chalk drawing by Leonardo da Vinci

Gregory Hines, date and medium unknown, sketch by Jules Feiffer

Study of the Head of Elizabeth Siddal for “Ophelia”, 1852, medium unknown, by John Everett Millais

Femme nue couchée, 1932, charcoal drawing by Pablo Picasso

Old Man on a Swing, 1826, medium unknown, by Francisco Goya

Untitled, 1950, ink drawing on parchment by Philip Guston

Europa, 1953, lithograph by Hans Erni

Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, 1514, by Albrecht Dürer

Love Forever (TAOW), 2004, marker drawing on canvas by Yayoi Kusama

Bird Personage, date and medium unknown, by Remedios Varo

Court Room Scene, date and medium unknown, by Honoré Daumier

Beekeepers, 1568, etching(?) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Drawings, dates, titles and media unknown, by Alberto Giacometti

Self Portrait, date and medium unknown, by Henry Fuseli

Tree with Trunk, 1998, etching by Louise Bourgeois

Drawing, 1944, title and medium unknown, by Pavel Tchelitchew

Nude Study, 1908, etching by Georges Braque

The Sower, 1888, pencil and pen and ink drawing by Vincent van Gogh

Portrait of Elaine De Kooning, 1940, pencil drawing by Willem De Kooning

Some Can Fly and Some Can’t, 1939, medium unknown, by Rico Lebrun

Le Chapeau-Main, 1947, lithograph by Hans Bellmer

Sketch for “Apollo Slays Python”, 1850, medium unknown, drawing by Eugène Delacroix

Madame Louis-Francois Godinot, 1829, medium unknown, drawing by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, with detail

Corps de Dame, 1950, medium unknown, by Jean Dubuffet

Cape Lion, 1650, medium unknown, drawing by Rembrandt van Rijn

The Man who Taught Blake Painting in his Dreams, 1820, print(?) by William Blake

Five Swearing, 1912, oil sketch by Ferdinand Hodler

Madame Sohn, 1918, charcoal sketch by Egon Schiele

Seated Bodhidharma, 18th century, ink brush drawing by Suio Genro

All the images used in this post were found on the web, and clicking on an image will take you to the page where I found it. Any information about the artwork that is listed as “unknown” is information I was not able to find at the time of making the post. If you can provide additional or corrected information I will incorporate it.

Readers are invited to nominate some of their favorite drawings for an eventual sequel to this post!

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2012/04/10

Ritual of Enchantment: Human Clay

Filed under: Dance,Movement Drawing: Performance Collaboration,My Past Events — Tags: Art Modeling, Body Paint, Butoh, Chashama, Claire Elizabeth Barratt, Collaborations, Dance, Exhibits, Experimental Performance, Figures, Hisayasu Takashio, Ink Brush, Installation, Movement Drawing, NYC, Process, Sculpture, Shows, Sketch — fred @ 21:52

Claire Elizabeth Barratt in Human Clay, a motion sculpture movement installation by Cilla Vee Life Arts, presented by Chashama, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

One of the most venerable functions of art is to transform the environment, to create a sacred space or a magical moment, to inspire the imagination or to open the mind to contemplate mysteries. This may be the impulse behind the painted caves of the Ice Age, and it is why places to pray and places to play are often designed as majestic spaces, or filled with images or music, beautiful light, fine materials, costumed performers, ritualized actions, and sensual delights such as incense and candles.

It is a common conceit of modern society to think we’re past all that, or to segregate such things to churches and carnivals and festivals, to dismiss them as kid stuff or god stuff, therefore not real. The paradigm for the contemporary art gallery is the industrial space with plain white walls and bright track lighting, the better to display work that is formally reductionist, coldly conceptual, or ironic, and of course, always very, very expensive.

Naturally there’s a counter-movement. I’ve always been drawn to alternatives to the white box gallery, and have mostly shown work in unusual venues or as part of collaborative multimedia happenings. One of the organizers of such events is Claire Elizabeth Barratt. She’s a dancer, performance artist, and installation artist, but I’d say her real art form is to bring diverse artists together in loose collaborative events that aim to create enchanted spaces. Under the banner of Cilla Vee – Life Arts, she’s produced countless events in a wide variety of environments.

In June, 2004 and again in August, 2005, I created live ink drawings as part of Human Clay, a production Claire calls a “Motion Sculpture Movement Installation”, melding elements of visual art, dance, and live music, all improvised in the moment. It was what some people call an “ambient performance.” A variant on “ambient music“, this term generally describes an event with a designated run time but no beginning, middle or end, so the audience can come and go at will, taking a momentary taste or settling into the experience for as long as they wish.

Human Clay was done in one of the 42^nd Street storefront window spaces hosted by the NYC arts organization Chashama. (I’ve written previously about solo drawing performances I did in Chashama’s windows.) In this space, people could see the performance through the window from the public sidewalk, or they could come in and sit down on the opposite side of the stage, with the city street as backdrop. I believe the performance went on for four or five hours each time it was done.

In this post I’m presenting pictures of all the drawings I made during the 2004 and 2005 performances of Human Clay, interspersed with photos of the 2004 performance that I took during breaks from drawing.

Hisayasu Takashio, sculptor, in Human Clay, a motion sculpture movement installation by Cilla Vee Life Arts, presented by Chashama, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

Claire’s description of Human Clay calls it “a constant shifting of landscapes composed of human, rope and twisted tree branch sculptures. The sculptor fervently constructs, molds and forms these elements in a race against time before they give in to gravity and gradually melt towards the ground.” The sculptor, shown above, is Brooklyn-based Hisayasu Takashio.

Fred Hatt drawing in Human Clay, a motion sculpture movement installation by Cilla Vee Life Arts, presented by Chashama, 2005, photo by Marc Dale

While the sculptor was moving his dancers and objects into ever-shifting arrangements, I was using them as models for brush sketches. I had hung long strips of white paper throughout the interior of the space, and over the few hours that the performance went on, I recorded my impressions of the fleeting tableaux with my dancing brush. As each pose was set, it would only hold for a few seconds before heaviness or the impulse to move caused the fragile structure to collapse, so I had to use my quick-drawing skills. There’s a shot of me drawing, above, and the finished panel below. As you can see, the drawings are quite large, so I could move the brush freely, and didn’t have to worry about crowding the paper too quickly.

Drama, left panel, ink drawing by Fred Hatt from Human Clay performance, 2005

Normally, a sculptor’s work is long-lasting, but this sculptor was working with living bodies and transient arrangements. It was up to me to capture what I could, covering the walls with my linear impressions of the slow, shifting sands of the dance.