Process Archives - Page 14 of 15 - DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2010/03/08

Empathic Portraits

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Portraits — Tags: Art Modeling, Crayons, Figures, Nudes, Portraits, Process — fred @ 23:03

Henry, 2010, by Fred Hatt

To draw a portrait from life is about more than just reproducing the shapes that constitute the model’s appearance. It has to capture the look of the person, to be a recognizable likeness. But I want my portraits to go beyond likeness, to suggest a mind full of thoughts and a heart full of feelings.

When I’ve done portraits on commission, I’ve often been not completely happy with the results. I’ve come to believe it’s because when I’m being paid to produce, I can’t quite get to the relaxed state in which I do my best work. That’s something I’ll have to work on. For this post, my illustrations are drawn from recent work I’ve done at the regular monday morning three-hour pose at Spring Studio, for which I’ve been the official monitor for many years now. At these sessions I’m neither being paid nor paying for the model. I’m there every week, and I can afford to experiment. Not all the drawings are great, but often enough I can really get in a groove.

Alley, 2010, by Fred Hatt

When I’m drawing from a live model, most of my attention is focused on perceiving and reproducing the curves and angles, values and colors I see. It’s a practice I’ve pursued diligently for over fifteen years. The drawing never quite captures all the subtle wonders of the living figure in front of me, so I can direct all the energy I can muster toward this task for the available time without ever coming to the end of it. Because I’ve practiced so much, this act of observational drawing is like a meditation. I don’t know what happens with brainwaves, but I know that the sensory and motor parts of the brain both become fully absorbed in the task of drawing. In this state, a subconscious awareness also comes into play, and I think this is the key to capturing a living essence.

Esteban, 2009, by Fred Hatt

In drawing, I look at the model so intensely that the experience becomes like that of gazing upon a beloved. The unique qualities of the face, even its asymmetry or scars, become beauty in my drawing eyes. The eyes, the hand, and the brain are fully engaged in a compelling but unperfectable task. The setting is physically and emotionally safe. Then the perception of the heart is able to open. I may not know what the model is thinking, but I have a sense of what they are feeling, at least the tensions and discomforts of the pose and the energy with which the model responds to that challenge.

Yisroel, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Having done the long pose as a model myself informs this awareness. The body is not designed to remain immobile for long, and there is a certain amount of low-level pain and suffering involved. Some models think, some meditate, some recite poetry or sing songs in their minds. Some show pride or defiance, others look sad or tired, thoughtful or reminiscent.

Michael, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Jiri, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Madelyn, 2010, by Fred Hatt

It is not only the face that shows these feelings, but often the entire body. The face and the body bear the marks of the person’s experience of life, and express the attitude with which they confront the world.

Diane (face), 2009, by Fred Hatt

Diane (body), 2009, by Fred Hatt

Joe, 2009, by Fred Hatt

All these drawings are 50 x 70 cm (19.6″ x 27.5″), aquarelle crayon on paper. Some of my other portrait drawings can be seen on my portfolio site and on this post or any posts on this blog tagged “portraits“.

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2009/12/30

Release

Filed under: My Past Events,Video: Dance and Performance — Tags: Collaborations, Dance, Eve Heller, Experimental Performance, Frank Hatt, Mike Montgomery, Music, Process — fred @ 17:48

Images from "Glossolalia + Katharsis", 1989, multimedia show produced by Fred Hatt

The tradition of the wild party for New Years probably has something to do with the idea of catharsis, an explosive releasing of pent-up emotion through acting out. We want to exhaust the frustration, regrets and resentments of the ending year by burning off the lingering energy to awaken to a fresh new day. Of course in real life it doesn’t work, and waking up to a hangover in no way feels like a clean beginning. But perhaps an artistic experience can give a taste of liberating paroxysm. In this spirit I present this little two minute primal scream made twenty years ago.

Excerpts from Glossolalia + Katharsis from Fred Hatt on Vimeo.

There’s a good story behind the making of this film. One of my housemates at the time, Mike Montgomery (now known as the lounge singer Monty Banks) was planning a tour of the Fringe Theater Festivals in Canada with Buck Duke’s Wild Sex Show, a potpourri of dirty jokes, puppets, magic tricks and R&B music with audience participation. To attract media attention, Mike planned to stage public confrontations between his character, Buck Duke, a profane cowboy mountebank, and a pompous European artiste named Lorean Dauphine, who would be portrayed in the faux showdowns by different actors hired in each Fringe Festival city.

Mike felt Lorean Dauphine needed his own show, and approached me about producing a multimedia extravaganza that could be presented in the festivals as Dauphine’s work. I would have just two weeks to complete an hour-long show that could be shown without my having to tour with it. I suppose I should have been offended that Mike thought of presenting my work as the oeuvre of a pretentious twit, but I thought it was an interesting production challenge and decided to take it as an opportunity to make something experimental. Mike suggested basing the work on themes from Georges Bataille’s Erotism: Death and Sensuality.

I put together a slide show with 280 images photographed from my own collection of art books: depictions of heroism, death and horror, eroticism and enlightenment from many cultures. The slides were ordered according to a classical hindu theory of Rasas, the gamut of moods or flavors in the arts.

To record a sound track we threw a party where we taped musicians improvising, under the direction of my brother Frank. I still have his notes for the different phases of the improvisation, which read, “Mirthful glee – righteous rage – sexual ecstasy – wailing & bemoaning – military pride – all falsetto – sustained chanting – percussive noises – tribal trance – everybody improvise poetry at the same time.” Frank and I had been doing what we called Glossolalia – freely improvised group sounding, mostly vocal – for several years by that time, and for the recording Frank led a large and, I’m afraid, unruly group in this.

We threw another party that filmmaker Eve Heller filmed in 16mm, at which “without rehearsal or preconceived structure, vocal and physical taboos were lifted and the resulting chaos became the ground on which the collective unconscious of the performers could realize itself,” as explained in a statement I wrote for a showing of the piece. One hour of film was shot, to be presented unedited. Around this time, I had first experienced the shamanic work of California performance artist Frank Moore, and his influence may be seen in the performance party.

That’s me in the film, juggling sheets of silver mylar and carrying a woman in a slip on my back. Frank is the guy with a mustache making magic hands at the beginning, and Mike is seen in a wheelchair. Party like it’s 1989!

The film, slide show, and sound track were created separately, to be exhibited simultaneously, with correspondences occurring only by chance. The show was presented in New York and at the various Canadian Fringe Festivals. One reviewer wrote, “Definitely in the running as the worst Fringe show of the year, this combines slides and experimental film in a way that goes beyond baffling. . . redefines self indulgence.” I figure it’s always good when you can redefine something, and if the critic thought it was so awful I suppose it met Mike’s requirement to represent the work of fictional Lorean Dauphine. April Panzer, director of TuCCA, the Tulsa Center for Contemporary Art, where the show was also presented, described it as “A cloud of chaos out of which periodically drop gems of insight.”

I felt there was a lot of good stuff in the piece, especially the slide show, but it was a bit long at an hour, so the following year I made this much shorter distillation of a few moments from it, and present it to you now as your cathartic New Years’ party. All the best to you in 2010.

On my Vimeo page you can see the full credits for the film and music.

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2009/12/15

Self Portrait

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Portraits — Tags: Crayons, Portraits, Process, Technique — fred @ 00:47

Self, 2009 (mirror inverted), by Fred Hatt

This is a self-portrait, drawn in 40 minutes this past Sunday evening. The version above has been flipped across the vertical axis so it appears as I appear to others, rather than as I see myself in a mirror. My self-portraits always look a bit angry. I think it’s just the intensity of the artist’s stare. I must look like quite an ogre to the models who pose for me!

While making this drawing I put a camera looking over my shoulder, set to take a picture every 30 seconds. Here are some selected stages in the development of the drawing.

In the first two minutes, I roughed in the highlights, drawing with the edge of my crayon:

Self, 2009, by Fred Hatt, in progress at 1:30

Next I started outlining the bright shapes:

Self, 2009, by Fred Hatt, in progress at 4:30

And then the dark areas:

Self, 2009, by Fred Hatt, in progress at 7:30

I started bringing in the color of the warm-toned light to my left:

Self, 2009, by Fred Hatt, in progress at 10:00

And the cooler-toned edge lighting to my right:

Self, 2009, by Fred Hatt, in progress at 11:30

Then reddish shadows:

Self, 2009, by Fred Hatt, in progress at 14:30

I started looking for the highlights within the highlights, making strokes that followed the three-dimensional contours of the face:

Self, 2009, by Fred Hatt, in progress at 18:00

By that point I was about halfway through the process. From this point on I was looking at color, details, and correcting distortions. The face was too thin, so I thickened it up:

Self, 2009, by Fred Hatt, in progress at 23:00

Toward the end of the process, I was developing the texture of hair and other details. These features can be drawn with a loose hand, as the energetic feel is more important than the precise detail. Some shadows appear reddish, while others are cooler in tone. I used a bluish green, the complement to the natural flesh tone, to deepen these shadows:

Self, 2009, by Fred Hatt, in progress at 37:30

I stopped at 40 minutes because I wanted the drawing to remain loose and spontaneous. Here’s the finished version, as drawn, not flipped as in the version at the top of the post:

Self, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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2009/11/09

Redrawing

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Process — Tags: Art Modeling, Crayons, Figures, Nudes, Portraits, Process, Technique — fred @ 00:23

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soft Angles 1, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

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

Soft Angles 2, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

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

Soft Angles 3, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

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

Soft Angles 4, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

Soft Angles 5, 2009, by Fred Hatt

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

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2009/08/05

Time and Line

Filed under: Autobiography,Dance,Figure Drawing: Developed Work,Movement Drawing — Tags: Art Modeling, Dance, Figures, Movement Drawing, Nudes, Process, Spring Studio, Technique — fred @ 22:36

Plantar, 2008, by Fred Hatt

In an essay I wrote in 1999 I said “Drawing records something photography does not – the movement of perception in time.” Every mark made in drawing represents a moment of seeing or of imagination. The energy of the artist’s strokes convey to a viewer something of the energy of the creative act. I want to preserve this quality of line, and for this reason have chosen to work primarily with media in which the line does not become blended or smudged.

Since the time I came to understand the time-based aspect of drawing, it has been an important basis of my creative process. I had first experienced drawing or painting as a record of the movement of consciousness in making abstract work, but I eventually discovered that my focus benefited greatly from working with models. In In order to practice working from models in motion, I organized “Movement Drawing” sessions, life drawing sessions in which the models were dancers and other kinds of trained movers.

Movement Drawing Flyer, 1997, by Fred Hatt

In order to make it possible to see and capture something of the movement, we asked the models to perform extremely slow movement, stop-and-go movement, and repeated movement (same gesture or movement phrase repeated for five minutes at a time). These sessions were challenging and exhausting practice. It was possible to fill an entire fat sketchbook in a single session. I was spending a lot on paper, and the piles of drawings in my apartment were growing quickly. One of my solutions was to draw many overlapping figures on the same page, using different colored crayons selected randomly so that the individual figures could be distinguished in the mesh. Here’s a typical example from that time:

Patrick movement sketch, 2000, by Fred Hatt

Another adaptation was drawing with ink on long scrolls, as seen in this previous post.

Around the time I was most intensely involved in movement drawing, I visited my family in Oklahoma, where I grew up. Looking through the artwork I had done as a child, the earliest sketch I found was a crayon drawing made when I was three years old or so. My mother had labeled this drawing as I had described it to her, “José Greco Dancing in Purple Boots”. José Greco was a famous flamenco dancer and choreographer who made a great impression on me as a child. Here’s a clip of Greco’s dance, followed by my childhood interpretation:

José Greco Dancing in Purple Boots, 1961, by Fred Hatt

Finding this drawing showed me that I had known my mission from the start. Already at age three I was inspired by dance, trying to capture the energy of movement through scribbly crayon drawings. I just lost my way in life and it took me nearly forty years to find my way back to the path!

Starting around 2003 I began using the technique of overlapping figures in different colors to make much larger, almost mural scale drawings, and developed a way of working in which I allowed a sort of chaotic buildup of figurative lines, followed by a phase of finding dynamic form in the mess. An earlier blog post describes the process and shows phases of development of one piece. A number of large drawings made in this way can be seen in this gallery on my portfolio site.

The remainder of images in this post are of several of these large drawings made in the past year. All are 48″ x 60″ (122 cm x 152 cm), aquarelle crayon (sometimes combined with oil pastel) on black paper. These are selected not necessarily as the best of my drawings of this type, but to show variations on the style. Each one is made working with a single model who takes multiple quick poses, mainly of their own choosing. Work with the model is completed in a single session, followed by further work on my own to develop and clarify the compositions.

The model for this one is a dancer of great intensity:

Tropic, 2009, by Fred Hatt

On this one I kept changing the orientation of the paper as I added new figures. It makes it a little difficult to read. I imagine it being displayed on a ceiling, or with a slowly rotating motor so different figures might dominate the composition at different times:

Edges, 2009, by Fred Hatt

In the next drawing, the overlapping figures become a kind of complex landscape, a mysterious cave:

Range, 2009, by Fred Hatt

On the drawing below, when I was finished working with the model I was afraid the mass of figures was a hopeless jumble, but bringing color into the in-between spaces caused the whole thing to crystalize beautifully:

Seer, 2009, by Fred Hatt

In these drawings, not only do the lines express the movement of my perceptions in time, but the multiple overlapping figures show the movement of the model over a period of time. Aspects of the bodily form, the quality of movement, the energy and feeling expression of the model become part of the resulting image.

The cubists were trying to move beyond the limitations of the pictorial or photographic view by showing their subject from multiple angles simultaneously, suggesting the third spatial dimension not by the traditional way of projection or perspective, but by fragmentation. In these drawings, I’m fragmenting the fourth dimension, time, to bring it onto the plane and into the frame.

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DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2010/03/08

Empathic Portraits

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2009/12/30

Release

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2009/12/15

Self Portrait

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2009/11/09

Redrawing

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2009/08/05

Time and Line

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