DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2009/05/02

Negative Space

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

Claudia Curl, 2008, by Fred Hatt

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

Grotto, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Lilli Grotto, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

Marianna & Emma, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Marianna & Emma, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

Stanley Folded, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Stanley Folded, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Jiri Twisted, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Jiri Twisted, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

Theresa by Corner, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Theresa by Corner, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

Maria's Feet, 2007, by Fred Hatt

Maria's Feet, 2007, by Fred Hatt

Clearly seeing negative space is about shifting the focus from presence to absence.  Finding the figure by looking at the negative space is one of the many artistic applications of the Hermetic principle “As above, so below” or “As within, so without”.  All reality exists on the cusp between interior and exterior, between past and future, or between any polarity you care to examine.  To draw is to surf on the points of contact.

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

2009/04/14

Composing on the Fly

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

Gaze Angle, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

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

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

Stage 1, overlapping poses:

Gaze Angle, stage 1, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Gaze Angle, stage 1, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

Stage 2, establishing a center:

Gaze Angle, stage 2, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Gaze Angle, stage 2, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

Stage 3, filling gaps:

Gaze Angle, stage 3, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Gaze Angle, stage 3, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

Stage 4,  end of time working with model:

Gaze Angle, stage 4, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Gaze Angle, stage 4, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

Stage 5, finishing touches, days later:

Gaze Angle, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Gaze Angle (final), 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

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

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

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

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

2009/03/30

Scrolls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009/03/23

Colorized

Filed under: Color,Figure Drawing: Process — Tags: , , , , , , — fred @ 23:36
Paul, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Paul, 2008, by Fred Hatt

“Grisaille” is one of the classic “old master” painting techniques.  Essentially, this means painting in black and white.  Color can then be added by using layers of transparent color washes over the monochrome underpainting.  The idea is that the white paint, reflecting through veils of color, gives a luminous effect that cannot be achieved by mixing opaque colored pigments.  It also frees the artist to focus on form and light and shadow and to perfect these aspects of the image before turning to color.

I’ve often worked as a projectionist.  Once I was showing a VHS videotape on a large screen through a video projector, and noticed that the image appeared to be a fairly sharp black and white picture overlaid with very loose veils of color.  A person’s face would have all the important details but the color was a sort of pink smudge that blurred beyond the boundaries of the head.  Technically, because color television technology evolved from and needed to remain compatible with black and white television, the video signal is a black and white (luminance) signal with a separate channel of color information (chroma).  Particularly in a consumer format like VHS, the resolution level of the color information is very low, so the color distinctions are literally soft and blurry, but the sharp luminance signal makes it look fine, at least on a small screen.  Enlargement via projection revealed the trick.

Color drawing is obviously different from oil painting or video technology, but understanding these things informed my color drawing technique.  I saw the power of white to project light and black to define form, and I saw that if the brightness values of the image are well defined, the application of color can be extremely loose without damaging that definition.  In fact, a loose hand with color seemed to have an invigorating effect on the drawings.

I see both values and color as perceptually relative phenomena.  By that I mean that what matters is not the correspondence of the colors or values to some objective scale, but how much brighter or darker, warmer or cooler an area is in relation to its surroundings.  Josef Albers’ classic Interaction of Color is the most thorough exploration of this relativity from an artist’s point of view.

The drawing above is essentially a grisaille sketch, using black and white crayons on gray paper, to which I have begun to add loose color, using only an orange and a blue to push different areas towards relative warmth or coolness.   This could be further refined by adding layers of loose color, which would work like transparent washes, to tint the grays.  Here the warm tones around the cheeks and nose and the cooler tones under the eyes may indicate variances in blood flow, but the warm tones above the eyes were probably seen because the major light source in those shadowy areas is reflection from the cheeks.

Here’s this process carried further, with multiple goings-over with scribblings of quite a few different colored crayons, and “washes” of overall color:

Keryn, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Keryn, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Shadows are always filled with complex reflected light.  Some of it is bouncing off another part of the body, some of it is coming from secondary light sources or reflecting off floors, walls, or other surfaces in the area.  It’s incredibly subtle, but again here the relativistic conception of value and color is helpful.

Leticia, 2008, by Fred Hatt

Leticia, 2008, by Fred Hatt

A more abstract approach to the technique, exaggerating the differences by leaving the colors more separated and “pure”, and virtually eliminating the overall wash effect, is perhaps even more effective.  Viewed from a distance, the coloration looks strikingly realistic, considering that no conventional “flesh tones” have been used in the drawing above.

These portrait examples are from three hour sessions, so there’s ample time to play with color, but sometimes I apply the same principles to quicker figure sketches.

Colin standing back, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Colin standing back, 2009, by Fred Hatt

On the one above the background colors are also a very loose indication of the model’s environment, as he was standing on a warm-toned wooden floor in a room with cool-toned windowlight illuminating the walls.

The next example essentially ignores the surface colors of the body and uses intensified hues to depict the variations in the light illuminating the form.  There is white windowlight from above and behind the body, cool fill in the upper shadows, and warm reflections from the floor beneath her.

Reclining Izaskun, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Reclining Izaskun, 2009, by Fred Hatt

All the drawings shown in this post are made with Caran d’Ache aquarelle crayons on gray Fabriano paper, 70cm x 50 cm.

2009/03/17

Sinew

Filed under: Body Art — Tags: , , — fred @ 20:02
Sinew 16

Sinew 16, 1992, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

One of my reasons for starting this blog was to give a new life to some work from my extensive and diverse back catalog.  So let’s get started.

In the early 90’s I was working towards a fresh approach in my art.  I’d done abstract painting, figurative drawing, experimental film, and performance art.  To me it was all just my artwork, but others saw these as completely separate fields.  I was looking for ways to integrate all of it.  Thematically, the art that inspired me was mostly either religious art or erotic art, or the art associated with magical philosophies like alchemy or tantra.  I wanted to integrate the subject matter as well.  Since the late 1980’s I’d been experimenting with approaches to art associated with prehistoric and “primitive” cultures, as these seemed to reflect a conception of artistic creation as a central experience in a unified magical world-view.

In 1989 I attended an all-night experiential performance piece called Journey to Lila by famed Bay Area provocateur Frank Moore, at Franklin Furnace in New York.  I’ll save a fuller description of that night for another post, but the essential is that it was not so much a “performance” as most of us would imagine it, but an initiatory journey, in which the audience was gently but persistently opened to new and mind-liberating experiences.  Frank’s work showed me that, even in the modern world, magical transformation could be the method, not just the subject matter, of art.

I had previously played a little with body painting, but now I was inspired to develop it as an art form.  I started asking people I knew if they wanted to get painted.  One of the early volunteers, seen in these pictures from January, 1992, was my friend Ed.

Sinew 17, 1992. Bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt.

Sinew 17, 1992, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In those days I was using liquid tempera poster paint.  It’s very cheap and non-toxic.  The experience of being painted with it is slimy, cold wetness, followed, as it dries and flakes, by a tight, scaly and itchy sensation all over the skin.  It isn’t exactly pleasurable, but it proved to be effective in inspiring those who experienced it to feel thoroughly transformed.

Sinew 18, 1992. Bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt.

Sinew 18, 1992, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

The backdrop was a roll of white seamless paper I’d previously used as a dropcloth for earlier bodypainting sessions.  The vertical part of the seamless had been painted by Jen, another artist friend and bodypaint participant, with the same tempera poster paint we used on the bodies.

I never designed or preconceived these paintings.  They were just spontaneous happenings.  But painting on someone is a collaborative process that is unavoidably affected by the quality of the moment and the interaction of painter and paintee.  The brush flows around the hills and valleys of the body, and thus something emerges that reveals both form and underlying energy.

Sinew 23, 1992. Bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt.

Sinew 23, 1992, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Sinew 26, 1992. Body paint and photo by Fred Hatt.

Sinew 26, 1992, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Bodypainting took on a life of its own for me.  Whenever I would show this work (in the 90’s it was usually as a slide show), someone would come up to me and volunteer to be painted.  So of course this became a major part of my work and grew many unforeseen branches over the years.

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