DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2010/03/29

Reverse Engineering a Drawing

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Developed Work — Tags: , , , , , , — fred @ 18:55

Twists, 2010 by Fred Hatt

Reverse engineering is taking something apart to find out how it was put together.  The term usually applies to technology or manufactured products, particularly in the case of competitors seeking to discover trade secrets or make knockoffs.  I’ve never heard the phrase applied to an artwork, but a drawing or painting does conceal stages of construction.  In my last post I wrote about artist William Kentridge.  His method of charcoal drawing animation reveals the drawings he exhibits as processes of exploration and development.

Over the last seven years I’ve been making large-scale drawings with multiple overlapping figures.  Each of these is created in close collaboration with a single model.  I call them “chaos compositions” because their process involves drawing over and over on the same page to create a field of chaos, and then working to find a dynamic structure within that chaos.  Many examples, and an explanation of the process, can be found in this gallery on my portfolio site, and others in the blog posts “Time and Line”.  The stages of development of a chaos composition are shown in the post “Composing on the Fly”.

“Twists”, pictured at the top of the post, is a recent chaos composition, 48″ x 60″, or 122 cm x 152 cm, aquarelle crayon on paper, created in collaboration with the great model Madelyn.  Figurative elements are clearly visible, but the overlapping is dense enough that much of it is essentially abstract.  Different colors are used in different figures, making it possible to discern connected parts of individual figures by following lines of certain colors.  I’m trying to create images that require a more active approach to viewing than the traditional straightforward pictorial composition, and finding the starting figures is one way of active looking at these pictures.  It’s a little easier to do this with the original drawings, in which the figures are close to life size, than with a small online reproduction, but here I’m going to do it for you, using cropping and selective digital erasure to separate the component figures.

Figure 1, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The lower part of this figure is easy to see in the finished piece, but the upper part has been heavily overdrawn and is difficult to find.  On these re-separated figures, where you see many other colors crossing over some of the contour lines, as in the left arm above, that is an indication of great density in the final piece.  Below, two figures from the left side of the picture.

Figure 2, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Figure 3, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

One of these figures serves to frame the lower left corner of the picture, while the other turns away, to reach out of the frame.  The line of the back has been sketched twice in the one just above, once in pink and then in a light blue, with a slightly altered repeat of the pose.  Toward the middle of the piece, there are several more dramatic poses.

Figure 4, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Figure 5, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The figure below is particularly hidden.  The hand, in white, really stands out, but the forward-bending figure with the crossed feet is difficult to distinguish in the dense mass of line and color.

Figure 6, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The one below is a little easier to see, but it’s an unusual pose that may be hard to figure out, and the drawing is somewhat distorted.  The model was twisting and leaning to her left side, so the angle of view appears to be from below.

Figure 7, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The figure below is in the upper right corner and has much less overlapping than the central figures.  This pose is a complex sculptural arrangement of counterbalanced curves.

Figure 8, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

In the middle of the composition is this standing figure, which is ghostly and hard to see.  Nearly every part of this figure is masked by something more dominant in its vicinity, including the yellow raised hand, which becomes an echo of the bolder white hand above it.

Figure 9, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Now that you’ve seen the drawing deconstructed, look again at the final version.  There are things going on here that can’t be seen in the separated figures, juxtapositions like the multiple hands in the upper middle area, organic shapes that appear between or in the overlaps of other shapes.  It is a picture of energy, a sketch of a single figure moving in time and space, an attempt to see in four dimensions.  I hope that the total is more than the sum of its parts.

Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Thanks again to Madelyn, the model for this piece, a fine model and a great creative collaborator.

2010/02/28

Dancing Brush

Filed under: Movement Drawing: Cross Pollination Series — Tags: , , , , , , — fred @ 22:43

February Cross Pollination #1, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Drawing with ink and brush has a fluidity that captures the energy of motion.  The brush is sensitive to the slightest variations in pressure, rendering lines that have varying weight and dimension.  I have long favored this medium for movement drawing, where there is no time to develop the image through shading, color and details.  That spontaneous moving brush line is both expressive and efficient.

I’ve previously posted my sketches from Cross Pollination events at Green Space Studio in Queens here, as well as here and here.  At these casual sessions, musicians, dancers and artists come together to inspire each other.  Often, musicians and artists dance, dancers paint or play music.  For an artist, there’s a lot of energy and rhythm to draw upon.  For an artist with a figure drawing background, it’s challenging because there’s little stillness.  My experimentation has led me to an approach that’s basically abstraction built on figurative forms and fragments.

February Cross Pollination #2, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The above sketch shows various elements of the scene:  the long dreadlocks of the saxophonist Sabir, the seated flutist Lori, and Theresa with her sketchbook on her knees.  Most of the other forms here are fragments of the moving dancers, glimpsed in a passing instant.

February Cross Pollination #3, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Here I went completely abstract with an octopoid shape.  You can’t tell it, but the lines here are also based on the bodies and movements of the dancers and musicians.

February Cross Pollination #4, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Attitudes and bearing inform the one above.

February Cross Pollination #5, 2010, by Fred Hatt

And here the dancers get a little wilder and freer, driven by the saxophone and drum you can see at the center of the composition.

All of these drawings are 18″ x 24″ (46 x 61 cm), sumi ink on paper, using brushes.


2010/02/07

Rhythmic Line

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Energy,Top Ten — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — fred @ 22:08

Modern Dance, 2008, by Fred Hatt

A sense of rhythm is as central to the art of drawing as it is to music.  It is the movement of the artist’s hand that gives a drawing its sense of movement and life.  Strokes that are fluid and responsive imbue a sketch with vitality.

I run a session at Spring Studio in Manhattan, where beginners struggling to get the hang of drawing from life work alongside accomplished artists who have logged many thousands of hours at the drawing board.  If you look at people at work, you’ll notice that most beginners draw tentatively.  They measure a lot and try to use intellectual knowledge to figure out what they’re seeing before they make their marks.  There is no rhythm or flow to their lines.  The parts of the body are drawn separately and never quite seem to integrate into a lifelike figure.  But watch a really good artist and you’ll see that the hand is in motion most of the time, moving with the sureness and lightness of a conductor’s baton.

Lounging Ryan, 2008, by Fred Hatt

The contours of the body are all curves of various kinds.  In drawing, these curves are translated into movements of the hand.  I allow my perception to flow along the contours like a skier gliding along the grooves and rises of a snow surface.  The drawing hand moves at a fairly constant pace, and those contours become rhythmic gestures traced onto the paper.

Natural, 2010, by Fred Hatt

In quick drawing, I almost never do any kind of measurement to determine proportions.  If the flow of movement is constant, proportions fall into place because of a sense of rhythm in the changes of direction.  The movement of the hand continues even when the pencil or brush is lifted from the paper, so that every rounded form is carried through from the front to the back, or from one side to the other.  Thus even an unshaded line drawing is given a sense of solidity and connection.

Arch, 2010, by Fred Hatt

In longer, more finished drawings, I do measure proportional and angular relationships and make corrections, but only after I’ve first captured the feeling of the pose through this rhythmic tracing of contours.  Proportions rigidly applied can crush the life out of a sketch, while giving priority to the flow and connection of forms can make a drawing communicate living energy even if the proportions are pretty far off.

Clasped Hands on Hip, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Attitude, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Complex shapes like hands, or complex poses that are hard to analyze in terms of straight lines, become simpler when treated as a continuous flow of curved shapes.

Hands, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Writhe, 2009, by Fred Hatt

The following sketches were done at Cross Pollination at Green Space Studio, a monthly event that offers the opportunity to draw while dancers warm up and move freely in the studio.  The dancers aren’t posing – even when they’re stretching or relaxing, they don’t stay in one position for more than a few seconds at a time.  The strokes I make are rough gestures, more often responding to memories of fleeting perceptions rather than the simultaneous perceiving and drawing I do in a life drawing session with timed poses.

Dancers Stretching, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Three Moving Figures, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Three Resting Figures, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Improvised Movement, 2008, by Fred Hatt

And here are two large-scale drawings – the first is 30″ x 48″ (76 x 122 cm) and the second is 48″ x 60″ (122 x 152 cm) – that take rhythmic flowing contours beyond the simplicity of the quick sketch:

Nyx, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Star, 2008, by Fred Hatt

If you like the movement drawings from Cross Pollination, check out this post for more.

2010/01/22

Give Me a Minute or Two

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Quick Poses — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — fred @ 11:41

Hand Over Eyes, 2010, by Fred Hatt

A typical traditional life drawing class starts with quick poses, one or two minutes each, and then proceeds to progressively longer poses.  Some people call quick poses “warm-ups”, reflecting the idea that a drawing session is like a workout.  For the artist, responding as quickly as possible limbers up the hand-eye coordination.  For the model, stretching and twisting wakes up the body and gets the energy flowing, which helps in holding the longer poses to come.  Some people call quick poses “action poses” or “gestures”, because both model and artist strive to project a feeling of movement or expression.

Crouch with Twist, 2009, by Fred Hatt

I love quick poses because they invite a sense of abandon in the models.  Active poses reveal a personal essence in how a model projects energy, and how that energy is revealed through the particular forms of the body.

Begging, 2010, by Fred Hatt

When you only have a minute or two, you have to respond directly.  There’s no time to waste dithering over corrections or using an analytical approach.  Faces, hands and feet are “detail traps” so I usually indicate them with very simplified marks.  The contours that reveal the expressiveness of a pose are all simple curves.  Each curve that I discover can be rendered with a single stroke of pencil, pen or brush.

Preparing to Rise, 2009, by Fred Hatt

These simple curves can indicate considerable detail about the model’s anatomy as well as their pose.  Drawable curves are not only the outlines of parts of the body, but may also be found in creases in the skin, the bulges of muscles or bones, or even the edges between areas of light and shadow.

Front and Back, 2009, by Fred Hatt

I try to keep one curve flowing directly into the next.  And though I usually sketch using only lines, not shading, I am always aware of the shading, and I see every curve as indicating a three dimensional form that has depth and heft.

Stepping Up and Turning Head, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Skin folds and the features of underlying anatomical structures often give a sense of the swooping or thrusting direction of movement of a pose.

Twist on Knees, 2009, by Fred Hatt

I’ll continue by interspersing some quotes from Kimon Nicolaides’ brilliant book, The Natural Way to Draw (1941, Houghton Mifflin).  This is the best approach to learning drawing that I’ve ever come across.  Though I describe myself as self-taught since I never went to art school, in a real sense Nicolaides was my teacher, through this book.  My sketches aren’t specific illustrations of the words that appear adjacent to them, they’re just interleaved to keep both eye and mind engaged.

Step and Reach, 2009, by Fred Hatt

“You should draw, not what the thing looks like, not even what it is, but what it is doing.  Feel how the figure lifts or droops – pushes forward here – pulls back there – pushes out here – drops down easily there.  Suppose that the model takes the pose of a fighter with fists clenched and jaw thrust forward angrily.  Try to draw the actual thrust of the jaw, the clenching of the hand.  A drawing of prize fighters should show the push, from foot to fist, behind their blows that makes them hurt.”

Crawling and Seeking, 2009, by Fred Hatt

“This thing we call gesture is as separate from the substance through which it acts as the wind is from the trees that it bends.  Do not study first the shape of an arm or even the direction of it.  That will come in other exercises.  Become aware of the gesture, which is a thing in itself without substance.”

Upward and Downward, 2009, by Fred Hatt

“Gesture is intangible.  It cannot be understood without feeling, and it need not be exactly the same thing for you as for someone else.  To discover it there is required only practice and awareness on your part.  You learn about it more from drawing than from anything I can say.”

Hands to Floor, 2009, by Fred Hatt

“By gesture we mean, not any one movement, but the completeness of the various movements of the whole figure.  That is why in the beginning I told you to keep the whole thing going at once.  The awareness of unity must be first and must be continuous.”

Head in Hands, 2009, by Fred Hatt

“The eye alone is not capable of seeing the whole gesture.  It can only see parts at a time.  That which puts these parts together in your consciousness is your appreciation of the impulse that created the gesture.  If you make a conscious attempt merely to see the gesture, the impulse which caused it is lost to you.  But if you use your whole consciousness to grasp the feeling – the impulse behind the immediate picture – you have a far better chance of seeing more truly the various parts.  For the truth is that by themselves the parts have no significant identity.  You should attempt to read first the meaning of the pose, and to do this properly you should constantly seek the impulse.”

Triangular Reach, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Nicolaides’ approach to learning drawing starts from two basic concepts, gesture and contour.  Initially they seem like opposite ways of approaching the figure.  Gesture drawing focuses on action and expression, while contour drawing focuses on form.  In practice, at least in my own experience, the two approaches gradually merge through practice.  Ultimately the energy of gesture imbues the tracing of contours, and the distinction between gesture and contour disappears.

Leaning Slope, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Forward, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Foot Thrust Back, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Most figurative artists have a natural inclination to prefer either quick poses or long poses.  Many artists in a self-directed practice choose to work on only one or the other.  I believe the best thing any artist can do to deepen their life drawing skills is to seriously tackle the type of pose they do not naturally relate to.  The energy and efficiency developed through quick drawing practice can significantly enliven a long pose drawing.  The sustained attention and notice of subtleties exercised in longer drawings hone the perception that is key to drawing quick poses.

Shoulder Stand, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Stepping Up, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Here are three more pages from my sketchbook, each one containing two sketches of action poses, subsequent poses by the same model from a quick pose set.  Notice what different qualities of energy and feeling are expressed in the poses that share the page.  This is the real heart of the study of life drawing:  the amazing variety of expression of the human body.

Head Turning, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Stride and Crouch, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Sad and Proud, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Most of the sketches in this post are two-minute poses.  They’re drawn with pencil or cartridge brush-pen in sketchbooks, sizes 11″ x 14″ (28 x 36 cm) or 14″ x 17″ (36 x 43 cm).

2009/08/12

Cross Pollination at Green Space

Filed under: Movement Drawing: Cross Pollination Series — Tags: , , , , , , — fred @ 01:30

Before going into the subject of this post, I will mention that this Saturday I will be exhibiting artwork and performing at “Summer Magic”, the fifth-anniversary fundraiser event for CRS, an important supporter of butoh dance, movement theater and healing arts in New York.  Info here.

Cross Pollination 02, August 2009, by Fred Hatt

Cross Pollination 02, August 2009, by Fred Hatt

Choreographer Valerie Green‘s lovely Green Space Studio in Long Island City (Queens, New York) overlooks the Manhattan skyline and the 59th Street Bridge.  Once a month Valerie hosts “Cross Pollination“, an open improvisational session in the studio where dancers, musicians and visual artists can practice their crafts while taking inspiration from each other.  For me it’s an opportunity to draw some dance and do some movement myself.  Many of the participants alternate between playing instruments and dancing or between dancing and drawing or painting.  Here are some of my recent sketches from these events.

Cross Pollination 02, June 2009, by Fred Hatt

Cross Pollination 02, June 2009, by Fred Hatt

Cross Pollination 03, August 2009, by Fred Hatt

Cross Pollination 03, August 2009, by Fred Hatt

Cross Pollination 03, June 2009, by Fred Hatt

Cross Pollination 03, June 2009, by Fred Hatt

Cross Pollination 04, August 2009, by Fred Hatt

Cross Pollination 04, August 2009, by Fred Hatt

Often the movement of the dancers at Cross Pollination is way too fast for me to draw the figures by observation.  I either construct the figures imaginatively from fragments observed or caught in memory, as above, or simply use the energy and fleeting impressions of figurative elements to construct abstract compositions like those below.  In these I’ve turned the paper to different orientations while working, so if you look at them from different angles you may be able to pick out recognizable body parts.

Cross Pollination 01, June 2009, by Fred Hatt

Cross Pollination 01, June 2009, by Fred Hatt

Cross Pollination 01, August 2009, by Fred Hatt

Cross Pollination 01, August 2009, by Fred Hatt

I know at least one other artist that often attends these sessions has posted her Cross Pollination work on the web.  Check out Irena Romendik‘s light-footed brushwork.

My drawings pictured in this post are either 18″ x 24″ (45.7 cm x 61 cm), ink on paper, or 50 cm x 70 cm (19.7″ x 27.5″), aquarelle crayon on paper.

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