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.
Drawing with ink and brush is more like ice skating than it is like walking. The lack of friction frees the movement to express the bliss of bodily momentum, making great looping explorations of space. Smaller strokes can zigzag or oscillate. If you think of the large flowing lines as low frequencies and the small vibrating ones as high frequencies, there’s a kind of musical sense of harmony and timbre going on in these ink brush drawings.
Equus, 2010, by Fred Hatt
Because of my regular practice of life drawing, all the lines I make have the curves of organic forms and the energy of living movement.
Leaping, 2010, by Fred Hatt
Sometimes Asian calligraphy shows this kind of loose, dashing, impulsive stroke. The drawing above is inspired by looking at people dancing. The simple brush strokes suggest figures but communicate their energy while only suggesting their form. The drawing below uses the same simplified strokes but is drawn more slowly and composed more consciously. Here you can make out many figures and fragments of figures. Some of the brush strokes may belong to more than one figure.
Community, 2010, by Fred Hatt
Combining the musical abstract approach and the calligraphic figurative approach produces more ambiguous images. I often like to keep the figurative elements of the drawing from getting too specific. Something that can be read in more than one way is more evocative.
Leda, 2010, by Fred Hatt
Every vertebrate is a snake at its core. Sometimes in movement we can experience a hint of that slippery freedom.
Sinuosity, 2010, by Fred Hatt
Smooth and constant motion is inertia, the same as stillness. We experience movement only through changes in direction or through acceleration or deceleration. As in every aspect of experience, change is fundamental.
Breast Momentum, 2010, by Fred Hatt
All of these ink drawings were made at GreenSpace in Queens, New York, during their Cross Pollination events, open sessions where the studio is made available for free improvised music, dance and art. The drawings are infused with the energy of the music I’m hearing or the moving bodies I’m watching, or from my own movement, as I tend to alternate dancing and drawing. The movment is too quick to allow for the kind of figure drawing I practice regularly in timed sessions with models, so these drawings usually go more abstract.
Black Sun, 2010, by Fred Hatt
The energy flows in from the music and dance, and manifests in the movement of the hand and brush. Another factor, one that becomes increasingly dominant as the page becomes filled with marks, is an intuitive sense of composition, a feel for dynamic asymmetrical balance in the plane of the drawing, balance of light and heavy, simple and complex.
Irrigation, 2010, by Fred Hatt
The elemental forces of the world are constantly moving and changing. We move to be a part of the process, and we draw to trace its fleeting passage in a lasting form. Cycles within cycles, changes upon changes, make a world, a life, a body of work.
Sky God, 2010, by Fred Hatt
All of these drawings are ink on paper, 18″ x 24″. Other drawings from the Cross Pollination sessions can be seen in these posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Here’s one of my recent works of a type I call chaos compositions. These are large-scale drawings, four by five feet (122 x 152 cm) and up, made with aquarelle crayons on black paper or canvas. These combine multiple sketches of the same model in different poses, overlapped willy-nilly without preconceived design. I basically keep adding drawings to the same paper until it starts threatening to be an indecipherable mess, and then struggle to reveal the beauty in the wondrous complexity that results.
Part of what I’m going for here is to create images that demand of their viewers a kind of looking that is completely different from our default response to pictures. When we look at a picture, we tend to see it all at once. We immediately recognize its imitation or simulation of our visual experience of the world, and relate to it through the reality or fantasy that it illustrates for us. Deeper looking may involve noticing telling details or observing how an idiosyncratic style communicates the subjectivity of the visual experience. But it is the immediate and unified visual experience that captures our attention and imagination.
A piece of pure abstract expressionism deliberately foregoes these illusionistic charms, but still, it tends to hit us all at once. We take it in as an overall composition of textures and colors and shapes that express something directly through their energy or their physical properties.
With these chaos compositions, the first glance is a hit of the abstract kind. We see a busy field of colors and lines, and maybe we get a feeling of swirliness or jaggedness. It is far too jumbled to be interpreted as a picture, though we cannot fail to see that the elements of the composition are human figures. Some are more developed and others more sketchy, some are clear and bold while others are almost lost in the density. Abstraction and figuration coexist here in a state of virtual tensegrity.
Most (not all) of the figures in these drawings are complete figures, but to see a figure in its entirety requires starting with its more obvious features and carefully tracing areas of color or line that may be woven in with several other figure drawings occupying the same plane. If the viewer is sufficiently captured by the drawing to try to unravel it in this way, he or she has been drawn into a way of looking that is far more actively engaged than the receptive mode demanded by most pictures.
Kuan, a dancer/choreographer and model who recently posed for one of these chaos compositions (not shown here because not yet finished), observed that these drawings are like maps of cities. There are different neighborhoods of varying character, all woven together by lines of movement. You can look at the map and get a kind of overview, but the only way to really explore the city is to follow the lines, to move about within it, experiencing the distinctive pockets of a particular character and the transitional areas where multiple characters may coexist.
Those posts should give you a good idea of the process behind these works. Here, I’m going to focus on the final stage of development of three recent chaos compositions, looking at the finishing touches whereby I try to discover the composition residing in the chaos. Here below is what “Dreamer”, the drawing shown at the top of this post, looked like at the conclusion of my session working with the model, Izaskun, before finishing work:
Dreamer, 2010, by Fred Hatt, early state
The finished version shown at the top of the post has been developed by a couple of hours of work in the studio, without the model present. If you scroll up and back down to compare the two versions, you can see that the early state immediately above this paragraph contains virtually all of the figurative elements that are in the finished version. You may be surprised by how little has really been added to the drawing to finish it. But I think you’ll agree that the final version has a richness, a “snap”, and a dimensional quality that aren’t there yet in the early state.
Unfortunately, these large drawings lose a lot of their impact in such small reproductions. (I’d love to have a show of these pieces in a gallery large enough to host a collection of them, but I don’t have anything lined up at this time. Any gallery referrals are welcomed!) Let’s look at a detail of “Dreamer”, in before and after versions:
Dreamer, 2010, by Fred Hatt, early state, detail
Dreamer, 2010, by Fred Hatt, final version, detail
Part of what I’ve done is simply to color in background areas to help separate the figures from the overall black field. I’ve also paid particular attention to the faces. I find the faces work as powerful focal points in these pieces. The face in the upper right quadrant of this detail has had its warm tones complemented by cool tones. The distorted face of the foreshortened figure in white, here in the upper center, has been proportionally corrected, which also allowed me to clarify the red-lined face just to the left of it. The faces in the lower left quadrant have also been sharpened or developed.
Here’s another chaos composition, “Hero”, shown as it was just after my session with model Jeremiah, and then as finished:
Hero, 2010, by Fred Hatt, early state
Hero, 2010, by Fred Hatt
Again, let’s look at a detail view, the better to see some of the finishing touches:
Hero, 2010, by Fred Hatt, early state, detail
Hero, 2010, by Fred Hatt, final version, detail
In this segment of “Hero”, nearly all of the final development is focused on the background. Color in the background clarifies both the figures and the overall structure while allowing the figures to remain close to their original form as raw, quick line drawings. The standing figure near the right hand side of this detail has been filled in with yellow, and a figure just above the eyebrows of the large face on the left side of the detail has been restored from almost complete obscurity to just near obscurity, by tracing its lines in a lighter color.
Here’s our third and final example, “Sole”. The model here is Madelyn. First, the whole piece in two states:
Sole, 2010, by Fred Hatt, early state
Sole, 2010, by Fred Hatt
This piece started with the large feet, drawn to nearly fill the space of the drawing. The full figures were then layered over and around the feet. For me the soles of the feet represent the human connection to the earth, our grounding. (A similar oversized sketch of feet, without the overlapping figures, can be seen here.)
Compared to the other two chaos compositions featured above, “Sole” has more of the feeling of a landscape. The figures are, if anything, even more hidden, and the background elements, especially at the top and bottom, have been filled in with more detail and texture. Here are our before and after detail views:
Sole, 2010, by Fred Hatt, early state, detail
Sole, 2010, by Fred Hatt, final version, detail
The in-between black spaces have been filled in with snaky and leafy patterns. The arch-backed figure in the lower part of the detail has been made more dimensional by the addition of a network of cross-contour lines. Both linear faces in the upper half of the detail have been sharpened with black and red and white lines. The toes of both of the underlying giant feet, which had become obscured beneath the figures drawn over them, have been brought out by the addition of red outlines.
In finishing these drawings, I am cautious not to overdevelop the figures that result from my initial work direct from the live model. I feel that the drawings made by direct observation have an energy that is rarely enhanced by further finishing, even if the figures are very rough or distorted. The finishing work is often largely focused on the gaps between the figures. Developing a background helps to push the figures into the foreground, giving them a feeling of depth and separating pieces that would otherwise be lost in the general tangle.
All three of the drawings featured in this post are 48″ x 60″, aquarelle crayon on paper.
In the late 1990’s, an important focus of my drawing practice was capturing the energy of moving figures through expressive line. This week’s post is a selection of drawings from 1997 through 1999. All of these feature multiple renderings of the same pose in different positions. It was my attempt to introduce the dimension of time into the two-dimensional world of the sketch.
Nested (Ignacio), c.1998, by Fred Hatt
In the drawing above, the transition of the figure from upright to fetal forms a natural nested composition, with different colored lines used to keep the phases of the movement separate. The drawing below is more like a stroboscopic sequence moving across the frame, reminiscent of this kind of photograph I remembered seeing as a kid.
Stage Cross (Arthur), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
Here’s a beautifully simple study of the movement of the spine:
Spinal Movement (Francisca), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
In drawing from a model in motion, it is often impossible to capture the entire figure. The composition below arises from the bony contours of ribs and arms, shoulderblades and collarbones:
Bony (Francisco), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
A model who is an expressive dancer can convey feeling even in quick movement sketches:
Emotion (Anna), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
Here are two figures, with two phases each:
Turns (Heather), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
Here, the arm of the forward bending figure becomes the leg of the standing figure:
Unfolding (Caitlin), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
Ink drawing with a brush has the spontaneity of dance:
Motion 4, c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
Here, the soft colors seem to be separating from the hard colors:
Stepping Out of Oneself (Miha), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
There are five fragmentary figures here, two drawn softly, in white, using the edge of the crayon, and three drawn crisply, in dark blue, using the point. The differing techniques make the white and the blue drawings appear to be on different planes:
Circularity (Corinna), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
The cool softness above is contrasted by the hot energy below:
Lunge (Claudia), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
At times, the overlapping lines of the figures cease being figures and become abstract patterns:
Grass (Anna), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
In drawing from moving models, I often focused on one part of the body. Here, it is the movement of the legs:
Legwork (Joe), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
The simplicity of the ink drawing below makes it possible to see many forms, not just figures, suggested in the flowing brushstrokes.
Motion 3, c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
When the models movements suggest power and vigor, those qualities come through in the drawing:
Explode (Toby), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
A softer style of movement makes a softer drawing:
Shimmy (Nyonnoweh), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
The model for the next two drawings was a dancer whose movements all seemed to flow from a supple spine:
Spinal Flexure (Donna), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
Leap & Turn (Donna), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
In the one below, the model must have been holding the poses for at least a minute, as there are relatively complete figures, kept mostly separated on the page:
Angst (Joe), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
Here two phases of the model’s changing states find expression in the drawing. The face, like a placid moon, looks down upon the thrusting figures below it:
Serene Vigor (Julie), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
I believe the drawing below arose from a model moving very slowly. As the upper body gradually changed position, I kept sketching the contours. In this case slow movement produced a sketch with a lot of energy:
Twist and Reach (Lea), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
Many of these drawings look like they should be painted on the walls of a cave. They have the roughness and vitality of stone age painting.
Stone (Claudia), c. 1998, by Fred Hatt
All of these drawings were done between the years, 1997 and 1999, mostly at the movement drawing sessions I used to run at Spring Studio in New York. The color drawings are done with aquarelle crayons and sometimes ink, and are about 18″ x 24″. Some of the ink drawings here may be as small as 10″ x 10″. The digital images used in this post were made in the same era as the drawings, by photographing the drawings on 35mm film and scanning the prints, so they’re not quite up to the artwork photography standards I try to maintain today.
Note: The “Claudia” that is credited as the model in two of the drawings in this post is not the same Claudia that many of my readers know as the blogger of Museworthy.
This week I’ll be teaching workshops and doing body painting and other fun things at the Brushwood Folklore Center in Sherman, NY. I won’t have access to a computer, so forgive me if I don’t reply to your comments right away, or if the next post takes a little more than a week to appear here.
Yasuko Kasaki interviews Fred Hatt at CRS, May 1, 2010, photo by Satomi Kitahara
At the May 1 opening of my solo exhibition “Healing Hands” at CRS in New York, I was interviewed by Yasuko Kasaki, author, teacher, healer and founder of CRS, in their beautiful, newly renovated studio.
The exhibit consisted of three bodies of work: “Healing Hands”, a series of color drawings based on the hands of the people who do healing work at CRS, “Heads”, larger than life-size portrait drawings, and “Chaos Compositions”, large scale, mostly multi-figure color drawings on black paper. The “Healing Hands” series remains on view at CRS through May 26, while the other two bodies of work were hung in the CRS studio for the opening on May 1 only. CRS Art Gallery Director Satomi Kitahara organized the event. See additional photos of the opening here.
The interview was part of the opening program, to introduce those interested in my artwork to my ideas and process. Just below the next photo is a full transcript of the interview. I have omitted the audience Q and A section to keep this to a reasonable length, but questioners brought up some interesting ideas that will be addressed in this blog soon.
Yasuko Kasaki interviews Fred Hatt at CRS, May 1, 2010, photo by Satomi Kitahara
Yasuko Kasaki: We’ve set up this series named Artist’s Way. Do you know the book, The Artist’s Way? Yeah, great book about process and how to progress our creative energy and so on. I’d like to let Fred talk about his secrets and his way of seeing things. First we should start with the Healing Hands, our exhibition. Those are the hands of healers, including mine. We do spiritual healing, and we see so-called energy. Energy is not actually the appropriate word, as a matter of fact. We are not seeing energy, but we see the quality of the spirit and mind and networking and flow, and connection and balance of the mind power or life force, or something like that. While we are doing this kind of healing, Fred, you see us and see something through your eyes. How do you see the energy?
Fred Hatt: Those drawings were mostly done before and after the healing circles that you have here. The various healers that were models for the drawings would sit in meditation, so they were just sitting and focusing their own energy within and I was just sketching.
Healing Hands #8, 2010, by Fred Hatt
I have always tried to see the human subject as energy rather than as an object. I don’t claim to have any clairvoyant ability or anything like that, but I have practiced life drawing with devotion and discipline over a long time. I go to two or three life drawing classes with timed poses every week. I’ve been doing that for about fifteen years. I’ve gotten to a level where the response of my hand is very quick. I think that what the lines of the drawing record are the movements of perception. I’m constantly looking, and as the eyes move and see a surface or notice some little thing, there’s a gesture of the hand that goes exactly with that. The closer the link is between the perceiving and the gesture, the more it picks up the energy or the movement of the act of perception. The act of perception is an interactive energetic or spiritual link with the person that I’m looking at. I think that intuitively it really captures something.
I did sketches of the healers’ hands, then later I took them away and did some further work, colors and backgrounds, in my own studio. More imagination comes into that part of it, but that’s also an intuitive response to what I can see from the position of the hands. Every little thing expresses something about the person: the way they choose to show their hands, the way that they’re resting, every little movement – little fidgets and adjustments. All of those things are ways of perceiving some quality of the energy. You start to see things not so much as an object of solid matter, but as something that’s flowing.
YK: I thought figurative painters study anatomy of the muscles and bones, but you don’t see those things?
FH: Well, I do, and I have studied that kind of thing also of course. I’m fascinated with that. But I also thought that’s not the only kind of anatomy there is. I’m self-taught as an artist, so I just looked into anything I thought was interesting and relevant. I learned about different ideas of the energy body, chakras and meridians and auras and all that kind of thing, because those systems are created by people who have focused on understanding the energy flow and the ways that different parts of the body are dynamically related, so there are insights to be had from any of that. But I don’t rigidly follow any of those things. I just take in as much information as possible and then try to respond intuitively in the moment, rather than systematically.
Healing Hands #9, 2010, by Fred Hatt
YK: You say moment, but those hands are still, and those faces are still – but not still at all. They are moving, because you are drawing movement. So then, you are drawing and constantly changing, right? So change and movement – you just try to get everything on the paper.
FH: Well, the model is basically still, although a living person is never really still. Even if a model in an art class is trying to sit perfectly still, they’re breathing, the blood is flowing, the mind is working, the nerves are working. There’s a lot of flowing energy going on. There’s also a lot of energy being exchanged between the model and the artist, because for the person posing, when you are being witnessed, when you feel that you are being seen, that really changes your experience. It makes everything you do, it makes your being a communication, a sharing. I think of drawing also as a sharing. I feel like if someone is posing for me, that’s a generous act, letting me really look, letting me try to see as much as I can see of someone. I feel like I have to work as hard as I can, I have to put as much as I can put into it, to honor that. I want that to be a gift back. I think that a lot of artists are making work for the public or the critics or whoever. I always feel like I’m doing it for the models first. I want them to see how I see them. I want it to be a mutual sharing act.
Donna, 2009, by Fred Hatt
YK: When I saw you for the first time here [at CRS], you were dancing here. [To audience] You know that he is a great dancer, great performer, he is so talented. And among other performers, he is really, I don’t want to use the word outstanding – outstanding too, but I don’t want to compare – but the quality of his performance is a little bit different. Other performers just showed us what they created, and said “See us.” But Fred’s way is “See? Can you see? Let’s see together. You can see this movement, you can see this light, see? It’s beautiful. See? You enjoy this?” Anything he does, his attitude is like that. [back to Fred] So sharing is all the time your core. And the gift is not from me to you, it’s just together. Let’s get this gift. This is your attitude. Great, I think.
FH: Picasso said “Creativity is happiness.” I really believe that.
(The video embedded above is a performance by Fred Hatt and Corinna Brown, done at CRS in 2007. More info available here.)
YK: Can you talk about color? I see color in the energy field. But how do you see these colors? I don’t think you perceive the same color, probably differently.
FH: I don’t take the same approach to color all the time. In some of the heads, the portrait drawings here, if you look at them from a distance the color looks fairly realistic, it looks like skin tone, but if you look close, there are no skin tone colors there. It’s a lot of different colors kind of mixing in the eye. I’m actually trying to capture some sense of the color I see, with the idea that color is a relative rather than an absolute quality. Colors change according to what they’re next to, and the colors of something like human skin are so subtle that if you try to just copy the surface color it’s flat and dead looking, so I’m trying to find those subtle variations. Where the blood is closer to the surface you get pinker tones, for example. That sort of thing gives this feeling of what’s below the surface, the life.
Michael W, 2009, by Fred Hatt
On these larger drawings with the multiple overlapping figures, I use color in a much more abstract way. I should describe the process. I work in my studio with a model. We start out doing quick poses, and I just do simple line drawings. I just grab colors at random. I have a big bowl of crayons, and I just use whatever I pull out. That way, once I have a huge mess of overlapping drawings, I can sort of follow one out of the mess by following the same color. It becomes a massive chaotic mess of lines that looks like nothing but static, and then I try to go into it and find order in the chaos. I develop parts of some of the figures, pull things forward, push things back, and find some kind of structure into it. It’s an improvisational process. This way of working creates these complex compositions which I would never be able to design. If I made preparatory sketches and tried to figure it all out on paper, I couldn’t do it. It only emerges from the process.
Seer, 2009, by Fred Hatt
Another thing that’s interesting to me about these is that for the viewer, it requires a much more active kind of looking than a picture. If you look at the portrait drawings, that’s a picture. You see and grasp the whole image. It’s very direct. Most figurative artwork is like that. When you look at these more complex pieces, you look into them and try to find what’s there and find the interesting juxtapositions that happen by chance.
The color in these pieces is, in the beginning of the work, random, as are several other aspects of the process. In the later development stages, I choose colors just out of an aesthetic sense. The colors in these aren’t symbolic or anything like that, but they emerge in the process. I think just because they’re on black, the colors have this neon, or black velvet painting, quality of light. I like to draw on a darker surface, because I think I see the light first, then the shadows. If you draw on white paper you really have to start with the shadows.
YK: What’s the difference between your seeing movement and drawing it, and your doing movement yourself, very different ways of expression as an artist?
FH: My experience with movement and performance happened from just following my interests, because since I was self-taught I didn’t have any teacher telling me I need to go in a particular direction. I think most figurative artists are not interested in experimental performance art. At least, when I meet other figurative artists, and I tell them I’m interested in that sort of stuff, they’re like “Ugh.” But for me that experimental work was really interesting because the artists were treating the creative process as an experience, rather than as the production of an object. I think that’s a very interesting approach. Before the invention of photography, just the ability to create a realistic image was a form of magic. Images were rare and had power just in their illusion of reality. Nowadays, we live in a world where we’re bombarded with images constantly. There are screens and advertising everywhere you look. Images don’t, in themselves, have any magic at all any more. They’re just pollution. How do you get back to that feeling of it having magic and power? To me, these really experimental artists, the butoh artists, the people that were doing happenings and that kind of thing, were trying to approach that problem by giving people an experience that can transform your perception.
I needed to incorporate this approach into my own exploration. I studied butoh dance and I did a lot of work with performance. I had to eventually come back more to visual art and drawing because I felt like that’s where my talent was strongest, and it’s where I found that I had the ability to do a really disciplined practice. And I’m an introverted kind of person, so visual art is more natural for that. But I think that the experience of performing was about trying to find new states. To enter into a performing state is sort of shamanic. What I learned from that really does inform the way that I draw, because if I’m trying to capture someone’s movement or their inner states, my own experience of feeling movement informs it, at least intuitively.
Range, 2009, by Fred Hatt
YK: You were doing really interesting and crazy things in New York City with the performers, gathering in the early morning and doing really crazy things and naked things.
FH: I haven’t really done that kind of thing recently, but back in the 90’s, in the days before 9/11, when there was no security anywhere, you could get away with anything in New York City, and we did. I think the specific thing you’re talking about is a series of performances in the summer of ’97. It was a collaboration that I worked out with Julie Atlas Muz, who is a well known burlesque performer and also a really good postmodern choreographer who did a lot of really creative and unusual performances. In that summer, every day that was a new moon or a full moon day, we would go out before dawn, with whatever other performers we could get to come with us, to some location around the city, the Staten Island Ferry, or Central Park, or Coney Island, some interesting location where there were a lot of things to interact with, and we did these interactive, improvisational happenings. Usually the only audience was people that we invited to come along and take pictures or video, but sometimes there were other people around, especially on the Staten Island Ferry where we sort of had a captive audience. The people that were performing could pretty much do whatever they wanted, but at that time of day, five o’clock in the morning, there is this incredible, powerful thing happening, the transformation of night into day. It’s a lighting effect that you couldn’t get from a theater lighting designer. If you had millions of dollars you couldn’t make something that amazing, and each time it was different. The birds are the rulers of that time, and they’re so loud, and human beings are so quiet. It’s the time when everyone is asleep, everyone is dreaming, and so even though you’re awake, you can be in a dream in the real world, because it’s the time when everyone is dreaming, That’s the predominant energy. Really amazing things happened in those performances. It was a struggle to get up really early in the morning and trek out to some place to do this thing, but then when we got done, we had to kill several hours before going to work or whatever.
Video capture from "Early Morning Dances: Belvedere Castle", 1997, performance by Julie Atlas Muz and Fred Hatt
YK: Yeah, now there’s security, everything has changed, but you are still open to happening. And happening is the same as miracles. You cannot make up a happening, but you can keep your mind open to happening. But to do so, I believe you need discipline. So your mind is really based on the steady, long discipline, I believe. So what kind of discipline are you keeping?
FH: The regular life drawing classes I mentioned, I’m really devoted to that, and that’s a kind of a meditative practice, but it’s an active thing. I also have had a practice, not quite as disciplined I have to say, with movement. All of the practice is to get to that place where you are confident enough that you can just respond immediately without having to think about anything, without uncertainty.
YK: How many years have you been doing so?
FH: You know, that’s really hard to answer, because since I’m self-taught as an artist, people say, “How long have you been doing that, when did you start?” Well, I was drawing when I was a kid. It took me many years to kind of find my way in bits and pieces, and that’s just an impossible question to answer because there are so many different moments where you could say it started here, or it started there. The regular life drawing practice has been the most consistent thing, and that started in the mid-90’s, but before that I was also doing a lot of creative things, but I was just a little bit unfocused, I would be writing poetry for a while, and then I’d lose my inspiration, and I’d start to do painting, and then I’d do that until I just felt like I was doing the same thing all the time, and then I’d stop and I’d start making films or something. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t going to get anywhere that way. I think my youthful idea was that art was about being in an inspired state, and over time I realized it’s really more about steady work and discipline. The inspired state is not so much about something that strikes you from the clouds, but more like really long work on changing the way that you experience the world, so that it’s experienced as magical.
Auricle, 2008, by Fred Hatt
YK: Do you know even Picasso tried to write a poem? He was struggling from painting and one day thought, writing looks much easier, and he wrote some poems and recited in front of friends, and Gertrude Stein said “Stop it! Go back to painting. At least your painting is better than your poems!”
FH: One thing I think I learned from deciding to be dedicated to practice is that when you feel frustrated, that’s not a bad thing, because usually when you feel frustrated, it’s not going very well, what that really means is somewhere on the inside you’ve already moved up to another level. You just aren’t able to do it yet. So if you just keep going, you will reach that level.
YK: So to say something as the artist is to go beyond perception. So beyond perception is to try to reach vision, and reaching vision is always a happy experience, but somehow we are scared at happiness itself. So that’s why you are training yourself to be happy, happy, to get used to the happy experience. That’s why we can’t stop joining you. Your art is like that for me.
But I can answer what you couldn’t answer by yourself, when you started drawing. It’s 1961. [Holds up copy of drawing] This is José Greco. Fred Hatt, three year old boy, just saw flamenco, and somehow, he drew it. This is his first – it’s amazing.
José Greco Dancing in Purple Boots, 1961, by Fred Hatt
FH: The story of that: I was a well-behaved little child, and I was the first child, and my parents were young, they were really interested in cultural events, and they could get away with bringing me, because I didn’t make noise, so they took me to all these things. They took me to see this famous flamenco dancer of the time, José Greco. I was so turned on by that, because it had stomping, and it was passionate, and I had never encountered anything like that before, so I drew that. I rediscovered that drawing when I was around 40 years old. I had finally come to the point I was really developing my visual art, and I was running these movement drawing classes where we had the models moving instead of standing still, and artists that were willing to try that would try to capture the feeling of movement, and I was working with a lot of dancers and performers. I went back and visited my parents and I decided to look for the old artwork that they saved, and that’s the earliest thing. I thought, wow, look at this: I was three and I already was inspired by movement and dance, and the way I was trying to capture it was scribbling with crayons! And it took me almost forty years to find my way back!
(An earlier blog post also tells the story of the José Greco drawing).
Here’s a panoramic view showing the large works in the CRS Studio. You may need to scroll to the right to see it all.
Panorama of exhibit in CRS Studio, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt
The Healing Hands drawings are 18 3/8″ x 24 1/2″. The Heads (portraits) are 50 cm x 70 cm. The larger works seen above range from 36″ x 48″ to 60″ x 60″. All works are aquarelle on paper.
