DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

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).

2010/01/15

Textural Bodypaint

Filed under: Body Art — Tags: , , , — fred @ 01:08

Vivid Dust, 2000, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Looking through my personal library this week, I came across an old book called “Design by Accident” by James F. O’Brien.  It’s full of ways to incorporate chance and natural phenomena into visual arts and crafts.  Just the Table of Contents makes me feel inspired, so I’ll share it here:

Tree Forms:  trunks and branches formed by the movement of pigments and liquids

Cracks and crackle:  layers in tension

Crawl:  rejection of paint by an incompatible surface

Drip, Dribble, Drop:  Pollock’s discovery and random patterns

Splash and Run:  designs formed by vigorous impact and gravity

Flow and Swirl:  “marble effect”

Wrinkles and Folds:  folding and bending of surfaces

Flowers:  patterns formed by drops of pigment on a coated surface

Max Ernst’s frottage technique and Pollock’s drips, Rorschach’s psychoanalytic ink blots and Hans Jenny’s Cymatics are among the well-known examples of this kind of thing in recent culture, but scenic painters, fabric artists, faux-finish decorators and craftsmen have always used these methods.  It is impossible to control the outcome tightly, but letting go of such control allows the magic of physics to impart its inimitable majesty.

For much of my own work the human body has been my playground, and I’ve used some of these techniques to create textural effects in body painting.  In this post I’ll share several examples.

Splatter, 1997, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Squeezing paint from squeeze botttles and letting colors run into other colors produces beautiful effects.   In the 1990’s I used to do this kind of body painting as a cabaret act in collaboration with performance artist Sue Doe, using fluorescent paints that glowed under blacklight.  One of our performances at the Blue Angel Cabaret was featured in the HBO series Real Sex episode 25.  I’ll do a whole post about the blacklight performances some day, but for now here’s one image of the squirting technique under blacklight:

Green Snake, 1998, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

And here are the beautiful fluorescent colors running thin as they are cleaned off in the shower:

Rinse, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Handprints have been used since the stone age to make dynamic patterns in paint:

Handprints, 1992, bodypaint by Fred Hatt and Jen S., photo by Fred Hatt

When tempera paint dries, it cracks and flakes off.  The crackled texture adds an air of antiquity to this freeform painting:

Fresco, 1996, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

And here, a coat of paint on the body has been rewetted and worn thin, drying with a marbled effect:

Marbled Belly, 1991, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Sculptors’ clay smeared onto the body dries in a patchy way, depending on local thickness, making fleeting textural patterns:

Wet and Dry, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In this one, clay was applied first for texture, and then paint was applied over the rough, earthy surface:

World Egg, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In this body painting session, done for a cover illustration for Lauren Stauber‘s haunting CD, Solarheart, the first layer was yellow and red paint, with clay applied over it.  The colors subtly bleed through the dusty clay surface.  Dried flower petals are scattered on top of the body:

Petal Strewn, 1998, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here, the model is covered with the dry powdered pigments used in the Hindu spring festival called Holi.  In the festival, which is celebrated in many places in India, and here in New York in Richmond Hill, Queens, celebrants plaster each other with hurled vividly colored powders and liquid colors.

Holi, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here, powdered pigments and bronze powder are used on the body, blended with massage oil:

Jeweled, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here, the front of the body is painted with oil and powdered pigments, and the back with clay and red paint:

Agate, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In this one, the first layer is blue paint, with clay applied over that and bronze powder blown across to adhere to the wet areas when the clay is in the patchily dried state as seen in the black and white photo above:

Lapis and Gold, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here’s a combination of the bronze powder with the powdered Holi pigments:

Painted Desert, 2000, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

An important focus of my exploration of body painting is the experience of the person who is painted.  Being painted is often experienced as a bodily transformation, an external experience of the skin that reflects or enables an internal shift of consciousness.  This ritual aspect underlies the importance of body art in shamanic and theatrical performance.  The stark white body paint associated with butoh dance originated with butoh progenitor Tatsumi Hijikata‘s experimentation with using plaster on his dancers’ bodies.  He wished to intensify their movement by making them conscious of the entire expanse of their skin through tightness and discomfort.  Oil, clay, powders and cracked tempera on the skin are tactile sensations that may be experienced as being one with earth or finding one’s wild animal nature.

Animal, 1997, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

I’ll close with a dyptich of textural legs.  In the upper image the paint is done not by the scattering or dripping methods used in many of the pictures above, but by tracing the blood vessels visible through the skin.  The legs in the lower image are painted with blue powder over oil:

Vessels, 2007, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Gateway, 2006, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Other body painting, most of it more painterly in approach, can be seen on my portfolio site, or on other posts on this blog under the category “Body Art“.

2010/01/07

B-Sides

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Anatomy — Tags: , , , , — fred @ 20:14

Robust, 1998, by Fred Hatt

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

Compact, 2004, by Fred Hatt

Triangular, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Violon d'Ingres, 1997, by Fred Hatt

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

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

Prism, 1998, by Fred Hatt

La Reina, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

Afar, 2000, by Fred Hatt

Fan, 2004, by Fred Hatt

Burlyman, 2004, by Fred Hatt

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

Energy Fields, 2002, by Fred Hatt

Backlines, 2001, by Fred Hatt

Back with Projections, 2006, by Fred Hatt

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

Crawling, 2002, by Fred Hatt

Leaning Back, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Blades and Curves, 2007, by Fred Hatt

Ankle Grasp, 2003, by Fred Hatt

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

Chair Back, 2001, by Fred Hatt

Curvaceous, 2004, by Fred Hatt

Dorsal Contours, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Press, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Squat, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

2009/12/01

The Mind is an Antenna

Filed under: Art and Philosophy — Tags: , , , , — fred @ 00:24
Crystalize, 2000, by Fred Hatt

Crystalize, 2000, by Fred Hatt

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

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

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

Projection, 1998, by Fred Hatt

Projection, 1998, by Fred Hatt

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

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

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

Ourania, 1997, by Fred Hatt

Ourania, 1997, by Fred Hatt

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

2009/11/09

Redrawing

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Process — Tags: , , , , , , — fred @ 00:23
Soft Angles 1 (detail), 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soft Angles 1, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Soft Angles 1, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

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

Soft Angles 2, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Soft Angles 2, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

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

Soft Angles 3, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Soft Angles 3, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

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

Soft Angles 4, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Soft Angles 4, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

Soft Angles 5, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Soft Angles 5, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress

Theme Tweaker by Unreal