Texture in Gray and Tan, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

I don’t usually think of my urban landscape photos as Fine Art Photography.  They’re just visual impressions, casually collected by technological means.  Unless it’s a job, I rarely go out specifically to make photographs.  If I’m going to the kind of event I think will attract a lot of shutterbugs, I’ll deliberately leave my camera at home.  But when I’m going about my business around town, provided I’m not too rushed or carrying too much other stuff, I often carry a camera with me.  Looking for pictures in the world around me is an exercise in seeing the world abstractly.  I like patterns and geometry, randomness (chaos) and design (order), elemental and optical phenomena.

Sometimes the patterns of shadows and light, when framed in the viewfinder, look like abstract expressionist paintings, especially when organic scatterings come together with rectilinear structures, as in the above image of mottled tree shadows falling across subtle bands of colored stucco and concrete.  In the picture below, the mottled pattern is light reflected from the windows of another building, a towering projection of fire in the middle of a monolithic shadow.

Light Within Shadow, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Decorative ironwork makes the stark necessity of security an occasion for creative design, and the visual layering of the black iron and the dark shadows in afternoon sunlight make a complex tessellation.

Cracquelure, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

At night, multiple light sources, of different colors, come from different directions, creating subtle patterns.

Stair Shadows, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

Here, the sun shines through windows of beveled glass onto a tile floor perhaps inspired by Piet Mondrian.

Sunlight Through Leaded Glass, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

A geometrical arrangement in red, beige, and dark gray frames an adumbral totem of modernity.

Cobra, 2007, photo by Fred Hatt

Another signpost is the figure on a ground of stippled gold and teal.

Park and Adelphi, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

In a shadowy corridor, a beam of light shining through a skylight gives this brass number a soft aura.

Three, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

In early morning sunlight, shadows and reflections from chrome architectural fixtures play like wild luminous graffiti across this stodgy corporate structure.

Plaza, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

I think of this one as a study in polyrhythms, as the different repeating intervals of light and dark, thick and thin, angled and perpendicular, come together.

Interval Variations, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

This composition of perspective and piebald is held together by the patch of bright orange netting in the corner.

Under a Scaffold, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

Here, shadows of trees cast directly by the sun overlap shadows cast by the sun bouncing off of greenish glass, a vision worthy of a great abstract colorist like Joan Mitchell.

Shadows in Green and Gray, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

Two lamps cast cones of light like sentries guarding this Romanesque arch.

Lamps and Arch, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

This porch light in the late day sun projects a robotic face on the wall.

Daytime Nightlight, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Someone tried to relieve the ennui-producing rigidity of this building façade by putting the vinyl siding on at a 45 degree angle, but the venous shadows of bare trees are what finally do the trick.

Winter Composition, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Don’t rectangles and organic branching patterns complement each other wonderfully?

Storefront, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

In this nighttime shot, the shadow of a cluster of signs and the crosswalk markings add their jagged geometry to a well-worn street corner.

Bold Stripes, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt

On this wall beneath an iron grating, two white lights and one yellow one create a network of stripes over the masonry.

White and Yellow Light, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Light reflecting from (I think)  a bowl of water in the sun throws this ghost on an old tin ceiling, with a bit of a rainbow forming about the lower left edge.

Refractive Projection, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

The cable installers never seem much concerned about neatness, and the angled sun turns their tangle into an art brut scrawl.

Coaxial Cluster, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

The columns in this neoclassical temple are cast concrete, but sunlight and bare trees give them the veined patterns of Carrara marble.

Fluted Columns, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Here the crepuscular rays of a car’s headlights cross the sidewalk slabs from one angle, while the elongated shadow of a bicycle, cast by a sodium-vapor streetlight, cross at another angle.

Crossing Light and Dark, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

Here the shadows of decorative ironwork dance across the treads and risers of a New York brownstone stoop.

Filigreed Steps, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt

White stripes, orange splotches, dark windows, a looming presence.

Night House, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

A tree’s narrow leaves make the shadows on this security gate, but it looks like the work of a berserk calligrapher.  The sky blue and pink paint on the wall are the colors of baby announcements, but what kind of world are they being born into?

Shadow Gate, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

The shadow of an ornate carved wooden cross at a Lithuanian church breaks as it falls across a stepped wall.

Segmented Cross, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

When multiple light sources of different colors cast shadows of a single object, the colors neutralize in the bright areas but intensify in the shadows, especially where light of only one color falls.

Tinted Lines, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

The city is designed and constructed of plane surfaces, but without the organic forms of trees and people in motion, it would be nothing.

Sidewalk Shadows, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

Before I get into this week’s material, I’d like to urge my readers to click over to Museworthy, where my friend, model, and blogging mentor Claudia is celebrating four years of her entertaining, inspiring, and enlightening blog about artists, models, and her life as an artists’ model.  Every Museworthy blogaversary post has featured a photo of Claudia by me.  Check out this year’s shot at the link!  And here are the shots for years one, two, and three.

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

I’m continuing to develop my own approach to watercolor painting, but I’ll wait to post on that again until I have a wider selection of examples to share.  Today’s post, though, does feature colors running in water, as well as optical phenomena of distortion and reflection, so you could see it as a continuation of themes.

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

The stills here are from “Driving Rain”, a video made in the spring of 2008.  This is one of my experiments in minimal cinema, using the video camera to capture fleeting phenomena of light and motion.  We are used to seeing moving image media used to present narrative, to entertain, educate, persuade, or manipulate.  I’m interested in stripping all of that away, to see the moving image as simply an image of movement.  We appreciate still pictures for their aesthetic and formal qualities, for their ability to show us the world through another’s awakened eye.  I believe video can do the same, separate from its rhetorical dimensions.  (For other “minimal cinema” efforts, see here and here.)

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

The video is nothing but a shot through the windshield of a vehicle during a pelting downpour, driving across the Williamsburg Bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan, through the streets of the Lower East Side, and up the FDR Drive along the East River waterfront of Manhattan.  There is no music, there are no voices, and there are no edits until nine minutes into the total eleven-minute running time.  Sounds boring as hell, you say?  It is, unless you give in to the film’s narrative blankness and start appreciating the peculiar complexities of the images and sounds.

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

There is the mechanical beating of the windshield wipers, the deluge’s waves of white noise, and the roar of the engine.  There’s the stop-and-go flow of traffic and the relentless flow of water from the sky.  The world is seen through a refractive surface of water droplets and rivulets.  Droplets are drawn downward by gravity, shoved aside by the wiper, and blown upward by the wind.

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

Because you aren’t actually driving in this monsoon, you are free to enjoy the musical phases of its various rhythmic elements, to marvel at the complexity of the movements of water on glass, to appreciate the impressionist scattering of light and color that the wet windshield introduces to the world beyond it.

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

The video is embedded below (unless you receive the blog by email), but I suggest following this link to see the video in full screen and HD resolution.  If your computer or connection isn’t up to that, or if you’re reading this blog on your phone, don’t bother – just enjoy the stills.  This video was conceived with the idea of projecting it in high definition on a large screen, and it works best that way.

If you appreciate the beauty of rain as I do, you might also enjoy this earlier post, featuring still pictures of rain in the city.

Glass Bricks, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

I’m feeling a bit oversaturated these days, both by the incessant rain we’ve been having in the Northeastern states, and by the relentless media focus on the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001.  If you’re interested in a long-time New Yorker’s look back at that event and its cascading effects over the past decade, look at my post from last year, “Signs in the Aftermath.”  For now, I’d rather distract myself and my readers with shiny things.

Insistent Squares, 2003, photo by Fred Hatt

I live in a city of glass and steel and plastic, colored electric lights and glittering curves and facets.  The quadrangular grid is the fundamental pattern of the city, rigid, regular, and inhuman.  But the grid is only the substructure for a culture of remarkable frenzy and chaos.  Chaos manifests in the pure optics of grids of reflective materials, as the inevitable imperfection of flat surfaces introduces dazzling distortions.  Sometimes the details of a reflected view are fragmented and repeated, something like what an insect supposedly sees with its compound eye.

Emergent Image, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt

There are layers of reflections, as when an object of stainless steel, with cylindrical curves, is viewed through a window, whose transparent and reflective qualities superimpose the space in front of the viewer over the space behind the viewer.

Modern Lamp, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

At night, metallic walls turn the various sources of light into swirling patterns like the methane turbulences of the planet Jupiter.

Steel Clouds, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

Or like the op-art paintings of Victor Vasarely.

Diner Rays, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Or like the tormented patterns of Arshile Gorky.

Plexi Deli, 2002, photo by Fred Hatt

Frenetic jabs of neon and fluorescent light put a figure in an environment of cold fire.

Silvery Gate, 2003, photo by Fred Hatt

Stainless steel facets turn architecture into abstract expressionism.

Deco Shatter, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Perhaps this view of reality, faceted, multiply reflected, distorted, layered, shows a reality that the classical image, with its hard-edged clear divisions, misses.  Objects are not separate, but exist only in a complex web of relationships.

Patchwork, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

A person exists only as a reflection of all that is around them.

Chrome Mannequin, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Our love of order and regularity makes us build an environment of reflective planes.  The imperfection of our planes reveals the contortions we like to think we’ve transcended.

Drunken Building, 2001, photo by Fred Hatt

Our grids are ragged and jagged.

Spasmodic Geometry, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

The more we try to order our world, the more it asserts its unwillingness to be ordered.

Amoebic Grid, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

The taillight of a car in the sunset becomes a scarlet thread in the steel quilt of a vendor’s cart.

Red Infusion, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

A new monument near Union Square depicts Andy Warhol as the artist who reflected his surroundings, mirrorlike.

Silver Andy ("The Andy Monument", by sculptor Rob Pruitt, 2011), photo by Fred Hatt

Regularity and symmetry are an illusion.  The world we move in is dynamically unbalanced.

Red Distortion, 2001, photo by Fred Hatt

Our reality is a membrane that seems to have an inside and an outside, but those two worlds are both implicit in the membrane, and their separateness is an illusion.

Winter Fruit, 2001, photo by Fred Hatt

An image like this exists only because of the conjunction of the car and the building reflected in its surface.  Light makes them one thing.

Pathfinder, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

A red printed number is on fire with orange and blue-green light.

$9, 2007, photo by Fred Hatt

New shiny, curvy, minimalist architecture exists visually only as a distorted reflection of  old, opaque, classical, decorated architecture.

Fragmentation, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

In many Asian businesses, the beckoning cat invites prosperity.  This silvery one also captures the colors and light of its surroundings.

Beckoning Cat, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Water is also used as a decorative element in the city of glass and steel.  Its light distortions are dynamic, always in motion.

Plaza Pool, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Here mirror reflection, reflected light and shadow, and a sloped glass wall are framed by flat and rounded opaque geometric structures.

Recursion, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

This combination of gridlike patterns and irregularly reflective surfaces is the visual essence of the twentieth century city.

Glass Loom, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Unsh, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Language is meant to flow like water.  It conveys meaning through cadence and syntax, tone and undertone.  It is the river in which our minds swim and spawn and take the bait.  Fragment and blow it up and find the weirdness in it, as you would find the odd creatures in a drop of river water seen under a microscope.

Ampersand, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

The English language is littered with mismatched characters and syllables and ideas, a jumbled rummage sale.

Hair, 2007, photo by Fred Hatt

Words on signs aren’t just signifiers, they’re physical objects that poke out, catch the light, rust, run in the rain.

Tunod Niwt, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Alphanumeric characters are wrought of our fundamental elements of form.  They become abstracted by accident, or by design.

Peace, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

All these pictures are from New York.  The city’s characteristic graphic mode is uppercase bold, and as long as a sign communicates no one has time to polish the raggedy edges.

Iquo, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Heavy fonts in all caps speak with chesty syncopation.

Clear, 2003, photo by Fred Hatt

Script fonts sing.  Big and bold script fonts are Broadway belters, pitching the tune to the cheap seats.

Grace, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

“Mosaic” is thought to be from the same root as “museum” and “muse”, but spelled the same way the word also means “having to do with Moses”, the Hebrew liberator and lawgiver.  Words in mosaic form look old and authoritative, even when they’re new.

OthS, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Words as signs cast shadows and coexist with all the manifestations of Nature.

Shops, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Big words are styled to give aesthetic force to what they signify, to convey qualities like whimsy, modernity, or sobriety.

Authority, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Many big signs these days are overly familiar corporate branding and generic marketing, but you still see a lot of high-spirited 20th century design.

S Broiled S, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

Like the babble of voices in a crowd, words on display can get lost in the layers and dissolve into multicolored noise.

Og & Cat Fo, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Sometimes I see hidden messages in segments of words.

Land Rot, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Some words shake their booties like shameless drunks.

Rub Righteous, 2007, photo by Fred Hatt

Others proudly proclaim their dullness and conformity.

Building Mart, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

Basking on glass, a word is projected on the underlying soft fabric.

Stones, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Choose me!  I am exotic in a fun and happy way.

Opt, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

I dare to be illegible but dashing, an arabesque in gridland.

Villency, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

We have everything you could want, and all of it is all lit up.

Neon Menu, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

In all the jumble and agita of the hard world, we offer you light and color and atmosphere.

Light, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Curvy swooping lines that sell a fantasy of elegant luxury contrast or merge with the jagged overlay of winter survivors.

Trump Palace, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

Rustic and quirky means wholesome and real.

Organic, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

That’s in contrast to the traditional corporate style, respectable intimidation.

Time War, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Neon words are spelled with bent tubes of glass holding luminous gas, little labyrinths of light.

Monum, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Stone words are the traditions that stand through the centuries, defying the ephemeral.

Crucified Again, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Shiny metal is the dazzle of the technological era.

All, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

A word can be like a vine, florid and tentacular.

Primary, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Another word embodies the neatness and assertive simplicity of the modern style, even amid a jungle of decor.

Optic, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Fun can be manufactured on an industrial scale.

Thrills Whee, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

Silliness and idiosyncracy can be picked up in a shop.

Parties, 2001, by Fred Hatt

We can make you think of the most intimate sensory experiences while you navigate the canyon of towers.

Smell, 2001, photo by Fred Hatt

When you come to a corner, hang a 90 and keep on trucking.

Groc Ery, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Pop art is all about abstracting icons and remixing ideas in the field of commerce.

Vote, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

It takes some patina to fulfill the classical style.

Hand, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

When the power is turned off, the word means its opposite.

Open, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Letters condensed to be readable from one angle look like broken stairsteps when seen from another angle.

School, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

In our time we are not ashamed of our desires.  They are the meaning of our lives!

Urge, 2007, photo by Fred Hatt

It is all about getting and getting more and more.

Receiving, 2007, photo by Fred Hatt

Even when it is all eroding out from under us, we shall consume.

Fresh Donuts, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

The only alternative to satiating our desires is lashing out in our anger!

Rage, 2003, photo by Fred Hatt

Three Worlds, 1955, lithograph by M. C. Escher

Recently, a cluster of unrelated events have turned my thoughts to the visual perception of space.  To be honest, it’s always been a preoccupation.  For several months I’ve been using the Escher print pictured above as my computer desktop image.  It’s an elegant depiction of the world of the surface, a higher world that is seen mirrored in the surface, and a third world that is glimpsed in the depths.  This can be taken as a simple image of the beauty of transparency and reflection, or it can be related to the cosmology that is common to shamanic cultures worldwide, where the world of our everyday experience exists between and influenced by both an upper realm of celestial patterns and an underworld of earthly spirits.  Our prehistoric and ancient ancestors have left us evidence of their engagement with the upper world through their sophisticated models of the movements of heavenly bodies, and of their journeying in the lower world through caves populated with powerfully rendered animal spirits.

I’ve always been fascinated by paleolithic art, and have posted about it previously, so of course when I heard that Werner Herzog had made a documentary film about the Chauvet Cave, the oldest painted cave yet discovered, I knew this was a film I had to see.  Here’s a publicity still of the director posing with an archaeologist who appears in the film dressed in an ice age fur suit and plays a reconstruction of a 35,000 year-old vulture-bone flute (sound file at the link).

Film director Werner Herzog, cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, and archaeologist Wulf Hein on location for the 2011 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams

You’ll notice that Herzog’s cinematographer, in the background, is holding a camera that has two side-by-side lenses.  That’s a 3D or stereoscopic camera.  We perceive depth partly through the way our brains process the input from two eyes offset from each other by a few inches, and 3D photography, which has been around nearly since the invention of photography, simulates depth perception by showing each of our eyes a slightly different view of the scene.

(I’ve also had a long interest in stereoscopic photography, and have posted some of my own 3D images in the posts “Shapes of Things” and “Depth Perception“, and even a 3D video in “3D or not 3D“.)

I’m not particularly fond of the current 3D digital projection processes -  there are several variants, all of which I find rob the cinematic image of much of its brightness and color, and are generally distracting and tiring to the eyes.  (Not to mention that a lot of films these days are shot normally, and then turned into fake, simulated 3D, which can look really terrible.)  But in Herzog’s film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the technique is effective in giving us the feeling of what it’s like to be inside the cave, and of how the artwork is integrated into the organic bulges and hollows of the limestone walls.  It’s the closest most of us will get to being able to be inside a real paleolithic painted cave.

One effect of seeing a 3D film is that it can make you more conscious of depth perception in everyday life.  But here’s something different and odd.  I went with a friend to take a look at this new sculpture, Echo, by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, that’s been installed through August 14, 2011, in Madison Square Park in Manhattan.  It’s a 44-foot (13.4 meter) tall head of a child, with eyes closed and a tranquil expression.  My friend said she couldn’t escape the illusion, when seeing the statue from a distance, that it was flat, like a cutout, and I had the same experience.  Seen from up close, it’s clearly three-dimensional, but from a distance it has an eerie, unreal quality.  It is surely an uncanny object.

Echo, 2011 sculpture by Jaume Plensa, Madison Square Park, New York City, 2011 photo by Fred Hatt

It appears that the scale of the vertical dimension is approximately double the scale of the horizontal dimensions.  Plensa uses 3D computer modeling to create his works, and here he has started from a realistic form, elongating it and softening the edges of the features.  The surface of the sculpture is cast in polyester resin and coated with white marble dust.  The reflective, almost translucent-looking whiteness, the simplicity of the forms and the serene blankness of the expression, the monumental size, and the lack of a pedestal all help to make Echo look like an eerie vision.  I believe the illusion of flatness is caused by the elongated scale.  We’re used to seeing huge flat pictures on billboards, and often from angles that distort the images in ways similar to the distortion of Echo.  When we see a huge face distorted, our minds assume that we are seeing a flat image from an oblique angle.  We are so habituated to seeing things that way that it is difficult to overcome the illusion even when we know what we are looking at.

Another eerie white object that appears flat even though we know it is round is the moon.  I came across this photo recently on the fantastic Nasa Astronomy Picture of the Day site, a bottomless fountain of beauty on the web.  If you look at this picture with cheap red-cyan 3D glasses (available free here), the moon looms out at you like the sphere it is.  Of course the moon is far too distant for the normal parallax separation of our eyes to reveal its shape through stereoscopic vision.  The picture here is constructed from shots of the moon taken two months apart.  The natural wobble, or “libration” of the moon provides two angles of view, producing a 3D image that could never be seen in reality.

3D Full Moon, 2007, red/cyan anaglyph by Laurent Laveder

Yet another recent stimulus to my thinking about the visual perception of space and depth was Daniel Maidman’s recent post about approaches to pictorial space in painting.  I urge you to click the link and go through the well-chosen example images – click on the small pictures to embiggen them.  You’ll learn a lot about the subject by reading through Daniel’s entertaining overview, and if you’re a visual artist of any kind yourself, you’ll probably also find it highly stimulative of creative ideas.  Daniel’s blog is really worth following.  He’s as good a writer as he is a painter, easy to read, funny, and thought-provoking.

Model with Unfinished Self-Portrait, date unknown, by David Hockney (featured in Daniel Maidman's blog post "Egyptian Space"

A lot of what I learned about pictorial space I learned by studying photography.  In photography one of the biggest factors affecting the way space is presented is the choice of lens – a shorter focal length, or wide-angle lens, gives a very different effect than a longer focal length, or telephoto, lens.  Here’s a street sign photographed with a wide-angle lens.  A wide angle lens literally takes in a very broad cone of vision.  For an object to appear large in the frame, it needs to be seen from very close, while the wide field of view includes a generous swath of background.  Perspectival angling of lines is emphasized, and the apparent distance between background and foreground is exaggerated.

Sign Back, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

A slightly longer focal length lens allows us to fill the frame with a similar-sized object from a greater distance.  Here the cone of vision is narrower, and thus the amount of background we see is limited and the perspective appears compressed, with the background seemingly right behind the subject.  Many professional photographers tend to favor long lenses, because they isolate the subject from all the distracting stuff around it.  Long lenses also make it easier to throw the background out of focus, which enhances the isolating effect.

Angled Planes, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

A wide lens lets you see a whole tall building from right across the street, or to get a feeling of space within a tight interior.  Any angle that’s not straight-on will show perspectival diminution.  Translating the view below to a drawing would require three-point perspective, with vanishing points to the left, right and above the frame.

Church and Tower, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

A long lens keeps straight lines straight, but tends to flatten the space of objects seen from a distance, as in this view looking towards the Manhattan Municipal Building from Canal Street.

Downtown Cluster, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Finally we get to some figure drawing.  Aside from perspective effects, which you can sometimes observe in seeing the body from a foreshortened angle, there are several ways to convey three-dimensionality in a drawing.  I generally try to make my shading and coloring lines follow the surface contours of the subject.  These lines are called cross-contours, and they’re a very effective way to create the illusion of solidity.

Rounded Back, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Lighting effects also help to show the spatial form of a subject.  Just as the differing angles of the two eyes create the stereoscopic effect, different colors or qualities of light coming from more than one angle can give solidity to a two-dimensional depiction.

Night Back, 2011, by Fred Hatt

In the drawing below, perspective, cross-contours, lighting, and negative space are all combined to give a sense of the model as a solid presence occupying space.

Smoke, 2010, by Fred Hatt

This is probably one of the most wide-ranging posts I’ve ever done, but I hope it hangs together around the concept of spatial perception.

All the images that are not my own link back to their sources on the web if you click on the pictures.