"Innenperspektive", illustration from "Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen", by Ernst Mach, 1886, G. Fischer
Your ability to draw what you see is limited by your ability to see. Vision is not simply a mechanical process that is naturally perfect. Seeing takes place more in the brain than in the eyes, and it can be transformed and expanded by serious practice, just like any other skill that involves the interaction of body and mind.
The complexities of human visual perception, and techniques for training or honing your vision, are a topic for a whole book. This post offers a collection of links and ideas as a very basic introduction.
If you’re up for an experiment, this link describes a “Selective Attention Test” involving counting basketball passes in a video. Read the description and then take the video test before reading further.
Part of learning to see is simply learning to notice things. Most people actually notice very little of what passes before their eyes. What they do see is what they have been taught or told to pay attention to. Stage magicians can make you not see something simply by directing your attention to something else. (Unfortunately marketers and politicians have also mastered such manipulations of attention.)
Cover of "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard, first edition, 1974, Harper's Magazine Press
In the classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes eloquently about learning to see in the natural world. Dillard is a poet, philosopher, artist, and keen observer of nature. Her words helped awaken me to the rich and strange mystery of seeing. Read chapter 2, titled “Seeing”, or better, get the book and treat yourself to one of the literary masterpieces of our time. Learning how to see more and better is a primary concern of the whole book.
Nearly any craft or specialty involves learning to see what most eyes would miss. For example, the ancient Polynesian navigators, who crossed thousands of miles of ocean in simple boats without any instruments, learned to see land beyond the horizon by observing light reflected on the bottoms of clouds. Noticing and naming the phenomenon awoke their vision to it.
Surface Anatomy of the Back, fig. 477 from "Applied Anatomy: The Construction of the Human Body", by Gwylim G. Davis, 1913, Lippincott
This is why figurative artists study anatomy. When you learn the names and locations of bones and muscles, you can see them because you know what they are. The subtle and sometimes confusing bumps and curves on the surface of the body are more clearly seen because you understand them as manifestations of an underlying structure.
But there’s a contrary principle. Sometimes what you know can actually make it hard to see what you see. For example, you know that the legs, for instance, are long shapes. But when they are foreshortened, that is, when they face you along their axis, they may not appear long at all. Thinking of the leg as a long shape may interfere with your ability to see it as a foreshortened, oval form. So there are cases in which you need to forget what you know in order to draw what you see.
"The Dead Christ" by Andrea Mantegna, c. 1480
The illustration at the top of this post is from The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, by Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, whose name has become the scientific term for the speed of sound. Mach’s philosophy starts from the idea that all we can know, we know via the senses, so understanding how the senses work is fundamental to understanding anything. In the illustration, he is attempting to represent the view from inside his head, through his left eye. You can see his nose and mustache to the right of the eye socket. This is a pretty good representation of what you can see with one eye, sitting in one place, keeping the head still, but moving the eye around.
Everything in the Mach illustration is in sharp focus. If the eye does not move, only a tiny fraction of what it takes in is actually seen sharply. The fovea is a dense cluster of light-sensitive cells in the center of the retina, the image-receiving surface in the eye. The fovea sees in high-resolution and full color, but it only covers a very narrow spot of the complete field of view of the eye. The eye does take in close to a 180 degree view, but away from center it becomes increasingly lower-resolution and less sensitive to color. If you could capture a snapshot of sensor output from the retina for a single instant, it would look something like this simulation:
Rough Simulation of Foveal and Peripheral Vision, illustration by Fred Hatt derived from "Fisheye Domilise's", photo by Editor B
The eye provides a wide-field view, like a photographer’s fisheye lens, but not very sharp, superimposed with a very sharp narrow-angle view like that of a telephoto lens. The wide view, or peripheral vision, is useful for noticing movement coming from any direction, and for orientation and aiming of the foveal center of attention. Of course we’re just describing the raw data coming in from the eye. The eye scans about and the visual cortex, or image processing center of the brain, knits all of this moving data together into a seemingly sharp view of everything. But fix your eye on one word on the page of a book and see if you can read a word a few inches away without moving the eye, and you will see that the area of sharp vision is quite small.
In observational drawing, we’re using these eyes, a sharp foveal scanning element combined with an unsharp peripheral image. The foveal vision cannot see the whole shape or composition, just one small area at a time. The peripheral vision can see the whole shape but without much clarity.
Certain practices and exercises can train you to make better use of this dual data stream. Artists understand this instinctively. Often you’ll see artists squinting at their subject or at their work. Squinting is a way of partially disabling the foveal vision, throwing the whole visual field out-of-focus. Since foveal input usually dominates the processing functions of the visual cortex, disabling the fovea allows attention to take in more of the peripheral view. This can help you to see the whole general field at once, understanding it as a simplified and unified shape. If you are an artist trying to turn vision into a picture, that is just what you need. It helps you to see compositionally, and to maintain proper proportions and spatial relationships.
I do many practices to improve my visual perception, not just when I’m drawing but when I’m moving about in the world. For example, I squint or cross my eyes to bring awareness to my peripheral view when I’m walking down the street. It is not unsafe, as your peripheral perception, important for navigation and collision avoidance, is actually heightened when you’re doing these things. Still, I don’t advise doing it while crossing a street as the unfamiliarity of looking at the world this way could be disorienting.
I also use photography as a tool for honing perception. If you carry a camera with a single focal-length lens, not a zoom, you will learn to look for images that fit within the angle of view of that lens. Your brain will be composing your visual world into a rectangular frame as you look at it. You are learning to see the world in terms of compositions and patterns, another vital skill for an artist.
Whether you are an artist or not, exercises to improve your ability to perceive the world can open you up to more of the beauty the world has to offer, and can liberate you from some of the marketers’ attempts to manipulate what you notice.
Illustrations in this post link back to their original online sources.
Yasuko Kasaki interviews Fred Hatt at CRS, May 1, 2010, photo by Satomi Kitahara
At the May 1 opening of my solo exhibition “Healing Hands” at CRS in New York, I was interviewed by Yasuko Kasaki, author, teacher, healer and founder of CRS, in their beautiful, newly renovated studio.
The exhibit consisted of three bodies of work: “Healing Hands”, a series of color drawings based on the hands of the people who do healing work at CRS, “Heads”, larger than life-size portrait drawings, and “Chaos Compositions”, large scale, mostly multi-figure color drawings on black paper. The “Healing Hands” series remains on view at CRS through May 26, while the other two bodies of work were hung in the CRS studio for the opening on May 1 only. CRS Art Gallery Director Satomi Kitahara organized the event. See additional photos of the opening here.
The interview was part of the opening program, to introduce those interested in my artwork to my ideas and process. Just below the next photo is a full transcript of the interview. I have omitted the audience Q and A section to keep this to a reasonable length, but questioners brought up some interesting ideas that will be addressed in this blog soon.
Yasuko Kasaki interviews Fred Hatt at CRS, May 1, 2010, photo by Satomi Kitahara
Yasuko Kasaki: We’ve set up this series named Artist’s Way. Do you know the book, The Artist’s Way? Yeah, great book about process and how to progress our creative energy and so on. I’d like to let Fred talk about his secrets and his way of seeing things. First we should start with the Healing Hands, our exhibition. Those are the hands of healers, including mine. We do spiritual healing, and we see so-called energy. Energy is not actually the appropriate word, as a matter of fact. We are not seeing energy, but we see the quality of the spirit and mind and networking and flow, and connection and balance of the mind power or life force, or something like that. While we are doing this kind of healing, Fred, you see us and see something through your eyes. How do you see the energy?
Fred Hatt: Those drawings were mostly done before and after the healing circles that you have here. The various healers that were models for the drawings would sit in meditation, so they were just sitting and focusing their own energy within and I was just sketching.
Healing Hands #8, 2010, by Fred Hatt
I have always tried to see the human subject as energy rather than as an object. I don’t claim to have any clairvoyant ability or anything like that, but I have practiced life drawing with devotion and discipline over a long time. I go to two or three life drawing classes with timed poses every week. I’ve been doing that for about fifteen years. I’ve gotten to a level where the response of my hand is very quick. I think that what the lines of the drawing record are the movements of perception. I’m constantly looking, and as the eyes move and see a surface or notice some little thing, there’s a gesture of the hand that goes exactly with that. The closer the link is between the perceiving and the gesture, the more it picks up the energy or the movement of the act of perception. The act of perception is an interactive energetic or spiritual link with the person that I’m looking at. I think that intuitively it really captures something.
I did sketches of the healers’ hands, then later I took them away and did some further work, colors and backgrounds, in my own studio. More imagination comes into that part of it, but that’s also an intuitive response to what I can see from the position of the hands. Every little thing expresses something about the person: the way they choose to show their hands, the way that they’re resting, every little movement – little fidgets and adjustments. All of those things are ways of perceiving some quality of the energy. You start to see things not so much as an object of solid matter, but as something that’s flowing.
YK: I thought figurative painters study anatomy of the muscles and bones, but you don’t see those things?
FH: Well, I do, and I have studied that kind of thing also of course. I’m fascinated with that. But I also thought that’s not the only kind of anatomy there is. I’m self-taught as an artist, so I just looked into anything I thought was interesting and relevant. I learned about different ideas of the energy body, chakras and meridians and auras and all that kind of thing, because those systems are created by people who have focused on understanding the energy flow and the ways that different parts of the body are dynamically related, so there are insights to be had from any of that. But I don’t rigidly follow any of those things. I just take in as much information as possible and then try to respond intuitively in the moment, rather than systematically.
Healing Hands #9, 2010, by Fred Hatt
YK: You say moment, but those hands are still, and those faces are still – but not still at all. They are moving, because you are drawing movement. So then, you are drawing and constantly changing, right? So change and movement – you just try to get everything on the paper.
FH: Well, the model is basically still, although a living person is never really still. Even if a model in an art class is trying to sit perfectly still, they’re breathing, the blood is flowing, the mind is working, the nerves are working. There’s a lot of flowing energy going on. There’s also a lot of energy being exchanged between the model and the artist, because for the person posing, when you are being witnessed, when you feel that you are being seen, that really changes your experience. It makes everything you do, it makes your being a communication, a sharing. I think of drawing also as a sharing. I feel like if someone is posing for me, that’s a generous act, letting me really look, letting me try to see as much as I can see of someone. I feel like I have to work as hard as I can, I have to put as much as I can put into it, to honor that. I want that to be a gift back. I think that a lot of artists are making work for the public or the critics or whoever. I always feel like I’m doing it for the models first. I want them to see how I see them. I want it to be a mutual sharing act.
Donna, 2009, by Fred Hatt
YK: When I saw you for the first time here [at CRS], you were dancing here. [To audience] You know that he is a great dancer, great performer, he is so talented. And among other performers, he is really, I don’t want to use the word outstanding – outstanding too, but I don’t want to compare – but the quality of his performance is a little bit different. Other performers just showed us what they created, and said “See us.” But Fred’s way is “See? Can you see? Let’s see together. You can see this movement, you can see this light, see? It’s beautiful. See? You enjoy this?” Anything he does, his attitude is like that. [back to Fred] So sharing is all the time your core. And the gift is not from me to you, it’s just together. Let’s get this gift. This is your attitude. Great, I think.
FH: Picasso said “Creativity is happiness.” I really believe that.
(The video embedded above is a performance by Fred Hatt and Corinna Brown, done at CRS in 2007. More info available here.)
YK: Can you talk about color? I see color in the energy field. But how do you see these colors? I don’t think you perceive the same color, probably differently.
FH: I don’t take the same approach to color all the time. In some of the heads, the portrait drawings here, if you look at them from a distance the color looks fairly realistic, it looks like skin tone, but if you look close, there are no skin tone colors there. It’s a lot of different colors kind of mixing in the eye. I’m actually trying to capture some sense of the color I see, with the idea that color is a relative rather than an absolute quality. Colors change according to what they’re next to, and the colors of something like human skin are so subtle that if you try to just copy the surface color it’s flat and dead looking, so I’m trying to find those subtle variations. Where the blood is closer to the surface you get pinker tones, for example. That sort of thing gives this feeling of what’s below the surface, the life.
Michael W, 2009, by Fred Hatt
On these larger drawings with the multiple overlapping figures, I use color in a much more abstract way. I should describe the process. I work in my studio with a model. We start out doing quick poses, and I just do simple line drawings. I just grab colors at random. I have a big bowl of crayons, and I just use whatever I pull out. That way, once I have a huge mess of overlapping drawings, I can sort of follow one out of the mess by following the same color. It becomes a massive chaotic mess of lines that looks like nothing but static, and then I try to go into it and find order in the chaos. I develop parts of some of the figures, pull things forward, push things back, and find some kind of structure into it. It’s an improvisational process. This way of working creates these complex compositions which I would never be able to design. If I made preparatory sketches and tried to figure it all out on paper, I couldn’t do it. It only emerges from the process.
Seer, 2009, by Fred Hatt
Another thing that’s interesting to me about these is that for the viewer, it requires a much more active kind of looking than a picture. If you look at the portrait drawings, that’s a picture. You see and grasp the whole image. It’s very direct. Most figurative artwork is like that. When you look at these more complex pieces, you look into them and try to find what’s there and find the interesting juxtapositions that happen by chance.
The color in these pieces is, in the beginning of the work, random, as are several other aspects of the process. In the later development stages, I choose colors just out of an aesthetic sense. The colors in these aren’t symbolic or anything like that, but they emerge in the process. I think just because they’re on black, the colors have this neon, or black velvet painting, quality of light. I like to draw on a darker surface, because I think I see the light first, then the shadows. If you draw on white paper you really have to start with the shadows.
YK: What’s the difference between your seeing movement and drawing it, and your doing movement yourself, very different ways of expression as an artist?
FH: My experience with movement and performance happened from just following my interests, because since I was self-taught I didn’t have any teacher telling me I need to go in a particular direction. I think most figurative artists are not interested in experimental performance art. At least, when I meet other figurative artists, and I tell them I’m interested in that sort of stuff, they’re like “Ugh.” But for me that experimental work was really interesting because the artists were treating the creative process as an experience, rather than as the production of an object. I think that’s a very interesting approach. Before the invention of photography, just the ability to create a realistic image was a form of magic. Images were rare and had power just in their illusion of reality. Nowadays, we live in a world where we’re bombarded with images constantly. There are screens and advertising everywhere you look. Images don’t, in themselves, have any magic at all any more. They’re just pollution. How do you get back to that feeling of it having magic and power? To me, these really experimental artists, the butoh artists, the people that were doing happenings and that kind of thing, were trying to approach that problem by giving people an experience that can transform your perception.
I needed to incorporate this approach into my own exploration. I studied butoh dance and I did a lot of work with performance. I had to eventually come back more to visual art and drawing because I felt like that’s where my talent was strongest, and it’s where I found that I had the ability to do a really disciplined practice. And I’m an introverted kind of person, so visual art is more natural for that. But I think that the experience of performing was about trying to find new states. To enter into a performing state is sort of shamanic. What I learned from that really does inform the way that I draw, because if I’m trying to capture someone’s movement or their inner states, my own experience of feeling movement informs it, at least intuitively.
Range, 2009, by Fred Hatt
YK: You were doing really interesting and crazy things in New York City with the performers, gathering in the early morning and doing really crazy things and naked things.
FH: I haven’t really done that kind of thing recently, but back in the 90’s, in the days before 9/11, when there was no security anywhere, you could get away with anything in New York City, and we did. I think the specific thing you’re talking about is a series of performances in the summer of ’97. It was a collaboration that I worked out with Julie Atlas Muz, who is a well known burlesque performer and also a really good postmodern choreographer who did a lot of really creative and unusual performances. In that summer, every day that was a new moon or a full moon day, we would go out before dawn, with whatever other performers we could get to come with us, to some location around the city, the Staten Island Ferry, or Central Park, or Coney Island, some interesting location where there were a lot of things to interact with, and we did these interactive, improvisational happenings. Usually the only audience was people that we invited to come along and take pictures or video, but sometimes there were other people around, especially on the Staten Island Ferry where we sort of had a captive audience. The people that were performing could pretty much do whatever they wanted, but at that time of day, five o’clock in the morning, there is this incredible, powerful thing happening, the transformation of night into day. It’s a lighting effect that you couldn’t get from a theater lighting designer. If you had millions of dollars you couldn’t make something that amazing, and each time it was different. The birds are the rulers of that time, and they’re so loud, and human beings are so quiet. It’s the time when everyone is asleep, everyone is dreaming, and so even though you’re awake, you can be in a dream in the real world, because it’s the time when everyone is dreaming, That’s the predominant energy. Really amazing things happened in those performances. It was a struggle to get up really early in the morning and trek out to some place to do this thing, but then when we got done, we had to kill several hours before going to work or whatever.
Video capture from "Early Morning Dances: Belvedere Castle", 1997, performance by Julie Atlas Muz and Fred Hatt
YK: Yeah, now there’s security, everything has changed, but you are still open to happening. And happening is the same as miracles. You cannot make up a happening, but you can keep your mind open to happening. But to do so, I believe you need discipline. So your mind is really based on the steady, long discipline, I believe. So what kind of discipline are you keeping?
FH: The regular life drawing classes I mentioned, I’m really devoted to that, and that’s a kind of a meditative practice, but it’s an active thing. I also have had a practice, not quite as disciplined I have to say, with movement. All of the practice is to get to that place where you are confident enough that you can just respond immediately without having to think about anything, without uncertainty.
YK: How many years have you been doing so?
FH: You know, that’s really hard to answer, because since I’m self-taught as an artist, people say, “How long have you been doing that, when did you start?” Well, I was drawing when I was a kid. It took me many years to kind of find my way in bits and pieces, and that’s just an impossible question to answer because there are so many different moments where you could say it started here, or it started there. The regular life drawing practice has been the most consistent thing, and that started in the mid-90’s, but before that I was also doing a lot of creative things, but I was just a little bit unfocused, I would be writing poetry for a while, and then I’d lose my inspiration, and I’d start to do painting, and then I’d do that until I just felt like I was doing the same thing all the time, and then I’d stop and I’d start making films or something. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t going to get anywhere that way. I think my youthful idea was that art was about being in an inspired state, and over time I realized it’s really more about steady work and discipline. The inspired state is not so much about something that strikes you from the clouds, but more like really long work on changing the way that you experience the world, so that it’s experienced as magical.
Auricle, 2008, by Fred Hatt
YK: Do you know even Picasso tried to write a poem? He was struggling from painting and one day thought, writing looks much easier, and he wrote some poems and recited in front of friends, and Gertrude Stein said “Stop it! Go back to painting. At least your painting is better than your poems!”
FH: One thing I think I learned from deciding to be dedicated to practice is that when you feel frustrated, that’s not a bad thing, because usually when you feel frustrated, it’s not going very well, what that really means is somewhere on the inside you’ve already moved up to another level. You just aren’t able to do it yet. So if you just keep going, you will reach that level.
YK: So to say something as the artist is to go beyond perception. So beyond perception is to try to reach vision, and reaching vision is always a happy experience, but somehow we are scared at happiness itself. So that’s why you are training yourself to be happy, happy, to get used to the happy experience. That’s why we can’t stop joining you. Your art is like that for me.
But I can answer what you couldn’t answer by yourself, when you started drawing. It’s 1961. [Holds up copy of drawing] This is José Greco. Fred Hatt, three year old boy, just saw flamenco, and somehow, he drew it. This is his first – it’s amazing.
José Greco Dancing in Purple Boots, 1961, by Fred Hatt
FH: The story of that: I was a well-behaved little child, and I was the first child, and my parents were young, they were really interested in cultural events, and they could get away with bringing me, because I didn’t make noise, so they took me to all these things. They took me to see this famous flamenco dancer of the time, José Greco. I was so turned on by that, because it had stomping, and it was passionate, and I had never encountered anything like that before, so I drew that. I rediscovered that drawing when I was around 40 years old. I had finally come to the point I was really developing my visual art, and I was running these movement drawing classes where we had the models moving instead of standing still, and artists that were willing to try that would try to capture the feeling of movement, and I was working with a lot of dancers and performers. I went back and visited my parents and I decided to look for the old artwork that they saved, and that’s the earliest thing. I thought, wow, look at this: I was three and I already was inspired by movement and dance, and the way I was trying to capture it was scribbling with crayons! And it took me almost forty years to find my way back!
(An earlier blog post also tells the story of the José Greco drawing).
Here’s a panoramic view showing the large works in the CRS Studio. You may need to scroll to the right to see it all.
Panorama of exhibit in CRS Studio, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt
The Healing Hands drawings are 18 3/8″ x 24 1/2″. The Heads (portraits) are 50 cm x 70 cm. The larger works seen above range from 36″ x 48″ to 60″ x 60″. All works are aquarelle on paper.
Practice itself is no secret. Everybody knows you have to practice to be good at anything athletic or artistic. Talk to anyone who has brilliant skills, whether with a fiddle or a basketball or a theatrical role, and you can bet you’ll hear they spend a lot of time practicing.
Shifra, December, 1995, by Fred Hatt
I’m a big believer in practice. As a young self-taught artist I had no consistent and regular practice, and it soon became clear that the occasional flashes of brilliance I perceived in my own work weren’t going to turn into any steady flame without a more disciplined approach. In 1994 I began a regular practice of attending timed life drawing sessions. I’ve continued to this day and will do so as long as I live.
Arthur, December, 1996, by Fred Hatt
The point about practice that I intend to make in this post can’t really be illustrated. I thought maybe looking at my sketchbooks over the years would reveal something about the effects of sustained practice on my work, but it’s not perfectly clear. The drawings show a great deal of variability due to changes of media, different models, or my own energetic state on a given day. Of course it’s a bit overwhelming to look at thousands of sketchbook pages over sixteen years. What I have chosen to intersperse with these paragraphs is simply sketchbook pages (or double pages) of quick poses (one or two minutes), one each from the month of December of each year since my practice began in December 1994. These are all practice drawings. None were made with the intention to exhibit them. There’s no direct relation between the images and the adjacent paragraphs.
Bruno, December, 1997, by Fred Hatt
Now when I look back at my work from 1994 and my work from today, I can see a lot of development. The quick sketches have become bolder and surer. The long drawings have gotten looser and lighter. The biggest improvement of all came in the first months of regular practice. The long-term gains are subtler, but deep.
Rae, December, 1998, by Fred Hatt
The life drawing sessions I attend are filled with people who believe in practice. There are a lot of regulars there who have been pursuing the practice much longer than I have. Why, I wondered, do some of these devoted practicers not seem to show any improvement in their skill? (I won’t name names!)
Estella & Rudy, December, 1999, by Fred Hatt
The artists who show no growth aren’t challenging themselves. They tread the same well-worn path over and over again. They started out challenging themselves, but as soon as they found an approach that pleased them or earned praise from others, they stopped right there and went into endless repeat mode.
Daniel, December, 2000, by Fred Hatt
If you are an artist, you may have had the experience of being encouraged to maintain the rut. When a dealer finds work that sells, they want more of the same, not more experimentation.
Nora, December, 2001, by Fred Hatt
Many of the artists at the studio only want to do what they’re good at. A typical class starts with quick poses and increases the length, finishing with longer poses. Artists that excel with long poses but deal awkwardly with quick poses often come late to avoid the quick poses at the beginning of the class. Artists that do well with quick poses and tend to bog down on the long poses often leave early. They may be avoiding the experience of producing “bad drawings”, but they’re not doing their craft any favors.
Maryam, December, 2002, by Fred Hatt
This week I was reading, in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, a review by Annie Murphy Paul of a book I haven’t read,The Genius in All of Us, by David Shenk. I came across this sentence: “Whatever you wish to do well, Shenk writes, you must do over and over again, in a manner involving, as [Anders] Ericsson put it, ‘repeated attempts to reach beyond one’s current level,’ which results in ‘frequent failures.’ This is known as ‘deliberate practice,’ and over time it can actually produce changes in the brain, making new heights of achievement possible.”
Maggie, December, 2003, by Fred Hatt
I couldn’t have put it better. Bodybuilders use the term “training to failure“, and many of them believe pushing the muscles to the point of failure is essential to increasing strength and bulk. I believe an artist should also train to failure.
Christophe, December, 2004, by Fred Hatt
In art, when you start a practice, you’re failing every time. This is why beginner’s practice shows such amazing gains. When you finally reach a level that pleases you, you can easily stay at that level without continuing to experience failure. Of course, you will not experience any further growth either.
Carlos, December, 2005, by Fred Hatt
Artists at the open studio drawing sessions often say they’re having a “good day”, meaning they’re happy with their work, or a “bad day”, meaning they’re unhappy with what they’re getting. But if you want to expand beyond your limitations, you should view every drawing as a failure. After all, there’s no end point of perfection where a work of art is all it can possibly be. If you are trying to depict what you perceive, keep looking – you’re not quite getting it all yet. If you are trying to be as expressive as possible, keep trying – there is still more that you feel, that is not yet making it into your work.
Alley, December, 2006, by Fred Hatt
Once you get pretty good at something, you should be constantly on guard against settling into the comfortable rut. Keep challenging yourself. Try changing your media or the scale of your drawing or your position in relation to the model. Try using your non-dominant hand. Keep varying little things. Whether you have a minute or several hours to capture a pose, always consider that amount of time not quite enough, so that you must work furiously against the relentless clock. These are the small everyday ways of challenging yourself that can hone your craft.
Stephanie, December, 2007, by Fred Hatt
Bigger challenges can actually deepen your art. That’s harder to talk about because those bigger challenges are much more idiosyncratic and uncommon. Often, the great challenges come from outside, rather than being self-imposed. But by constantly challenging your craft in small ways, you are also developing flexibility and an orientation towards responding to problems by growth and adaptation rather than by denial and resistance.
Jaece, December, 2008, by Fred Hatt
In small things, strive beyond your ability. In large things, aspire to the impossible. Welcome failure, as often as possible. Failure is your friend! That’s the secret!
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.
Rest Energy, photo of a 1980 performance by Marina Abramovic and Ulay, photo from Galleria Lia Rumma
The Museum of Modern Art in New York currently hosts retrospectives of two idiosyncratic and uncompromising living artists, Yugoslavian born Marina Abramovic and South African William Kentridge. The two artists could hardly be more different from each other, but each has followed the path of art as something deeply personal and necessary.
Marina Abramovic emerged as a performance artist in the 1970’s. Using her own body as her medium, she explored the power of living presence in ritual acts of vulnerability and endurance. Her earliest works were so raw and risky they still shock – for example, in Rhythm 2 (1974), she took drugs that caused seizures, convulsions and catatonia. But then in the 70’s everyone was experimenting with drugs – she just did it in front of an audience.
In 1976 she began a twelve year collaboration with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). The work they did together achieved a kind of spiritual and aesthetic clarity that has not been surpassed, even as this kind of work has entered the mainstream with David Blaine‘s well-publicized acts of endurance. In “Rest Energy”, pictured at the top of the post, Abramovic and Ulay lean apart, their weight suspended by the tension of a bowstring with an arrow aimed at Abramovic’s heart.
Abramovic and Ulay traveled continuously, living in an old Citroen van (the van is in the MoMA exhibit), fully devoting their lives to their artistic experiment. A statement they wrote at the time (1975) reads:
no fixed living-place
permanent movement
direct contact
local relation
self-selection
passing limitations
taking risks
mobile energy
no rehearsals
no predicted end
no repetition
extended vulnerability
exposure to chance
primary reactions
Abramovic and Ulay parted ways in 1988. Much of Abramovic’s solo work from the 90’s looks to me more strident and more self-conscious about making “statements”, but in her most recent work she seems to be rediscovering the power of simplicity.
The Abramovic retrospective at MoMA includes documentation of a great many of these performances that tested the limits of the mind and body and the relationship between artist and audience. It also includes living “reperformers”, re-enacting several of the most well-known actions. The one that has been most widely discussed is Imponderabilia, originally performed by Abramovic and Ulay in 1977. A naked male and female stand impassively facing each other in a narrow doorway, through which museumgoers may pass only by squeezing sideways between the pair.
Abramovic has long argued that performance art must be kept alive by reperformance, and in her 2005 show at the Guggenheim Museum she herself reperformed a number of seminal performance works originally done decades ago by such artists as Joseph Beuys and Valie Export. It is undeniable that the MoMA show is more interesting with live bodies interspersed among the old documentation, but the change of context has surely altered the effect of the pieces. It is not just that what were once radical experiments are now enshrined in the most institutional of museums. The original pieces were radically minimalist – highly clarified simple happenings in isolation, usually presented in blank gallery spaces. The MoMA exhibit is like a crowded menagerie of acts and images, with a steady flow of tourists trying to see it all before their feet give out or the kids start crying or they have to meet someone for dinner.
The title of the Abramovic show at MoMA is The Artist Is Present, and it is with her own simple presence that she makes the strongest statement and the deepest impression in this show. In the great atrium of the Museum, throughout the public hours while her exhibit is open, the 63-year-old artist sits silently at a table, while museumgoers are invited to sit directly across from her. She sits all day, and will do so for 77 days. This is about as radically minimal as performance can get. She is not doing anything sensational, really not doing anything at all. But if you’ve tried to sit still for even an hour you know it becomes incredibly grueling. You can often see the pain in her face as she holds steady eye contact with an endless stream of museum visitors, some of whom sit for moments, and some for hours. It is an act of extreme endurance, but also, in a way, an act of extreme generosity, giving herself to her audience in direct human presence. Observe for a while and you’ll see suffering, defiance, confrontation, resignation, engagement, boredom and bliss – the full range of the human condition living and breathing there before us. Amazingly, her simple presence fills up the gigantic atrium space more than any of the monumental pieces of art I’ve seen there over the years.
On the opening day, her former collaborator, Ulay, showed up at the table for an unexpected tearful reunion:
Ulay and Marina Abramovic, March, 2010, photo by Scott Rudd for MoMA
Just off the Atrium is the entrance to another immersive exhibit, William Kentridge: Five Themes. Timed to coincide with Kentridge’s multimedia staging of Shostakovich’s operaThe Nose (based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story) at the Metropolitan Opera, this retrospective shows Kentridge’s drawings, prints, animated films, theatrical designs, optical experiments and even animatronic puppets as a diverse but highly unified body of work that spans media and obliterates the traditional line dividing graphic art and theatrical storytelling.
Kentridge became widely known in the 1990’s for his 9 Drawings for Projection (1989-2003), a series of richly evocative short animated films, made by drawing, erasing and redrawing large charcoal sketches on paper. Originally shown one at a time in galleries in conjuction with exhibits of the final-stage charcoal drawings, the series of films hangs loosely together as a single ongoing story. They tell of an industrialist, Soho Eckstein, his wife, and her lover, the bohemian Felix Teitlebaum, who is always depicted naked. Eckstein and Teitlebaum are opposites in a way, but both recognizably resemble Kentridge. The story in 9 Drawings plays out across the backdrop of the upheavals of South Africa in the late apartheid and early post-apartheid eras, but the films aren’t straightforwardly political. Instead they’re personal and poetic. The erasures and redrawing of the filmmaking technique, the transformations of the elemental and mechanical imagery, the ebb and flow of the lives of the characters, and the shifting sands of cultural change are all of a piece, an era of life experience distilled into a cinematic dream. I get the impression that the transformations of the drawings are not preconceived, but exploratory.
Drawing from “Felix in Exile”, 1994, one of “9 Drawings for Projection” by William Kentridge
The museum show is arranged not chronologically or by media, but thematically. The 9 Drawings and other films are projected at monumental size, with the real drawings, also quite large, nearby, allowing one to experience the images in both their forms, as mutable projections and as the tactile reality of smudgy charcoal on heavily worked paper.
Kentridge is an obsessive drawer and mark-maker. One room in the MoMA show surrounds us with multiple projections showing him drawing, tearing paper, pouring ink, etc., often in reverse. Other rooms are filled with projections, drawings and objects based around designs for his recent operatic productions, Mozart’s Magic Flute and Shostakovich’s The Nose. There is almost too much to take in, a barrage of images and ideas, nearly all in bold black and white, with a rough, handmade texture. Throughout the exhibit there are many recurring images, including water and bathing, mechanically walking figures, birds and rhinoceroses, the industrialized landscape, Alfred Jarry’s corrupt king Ubu, and especially Kentridge’s own heavyset self-image.
Kentridge’s work is not colorful, and while it is bold, it is not simplistic. It is gray and ambiguous and conflicted. It draws upon the angular dynamism of early-20th-century avant-garde design, but the boldness is more than anything else the magnified theatrical gesture of the human form. This is the closest contemporary work I know to the great etchings of Goya, the Caprichos and the Disasters of War. For Kentridge the act of drawing is theatrical, improvisational and demonstrative, and theater is a graphic art where shadows and lines convey ideas and feelings.
Drawing for II Sole 24 Ore (World Walking), 2007, by William Kentridge; Charcoal, gouache, pastel, and colored pencil on paper, Marion Goodman Gallery
I’ll close with a quote from the Phaidon Monograph, William Kentridge, by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev et al, that reveals something about his open-ended creative process:
“Drawing for me is about fluidity. There may be a vague sense of what you’re going to draw but things occur during the process that may modify, consolidate or shed doubts on what you know. So drawing is a testing of ideas; a slow-motion version of thought. It does not arrive instantly like a photograph. The uncertain and imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning. What ends in clarity does not begin that way.”
Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator at Large, The Museum of Modern Art, and Director, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, is on view through May 31, 2010, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
William Kentridge: Five Themes, originally organized for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art by Mark Rosenthal, is on view through May 17, 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Images in this post link back to the sites where I found them.
