DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2011/12/03

Form as Energy

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Energy,My Events: Exhibitions — Tags: , , , , , , — fred @ 19:55

Attraction, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The Center for Remembering and Sharing, or CRS, is an organization devoted to supporting and teaching healing arts and creative arts.  Their studios near Union Square in Manhattan host dance and yoga classes, bodywork sessions, film screenings, performances (music, dance and theater), and meditation and energy healing circles.  I got involved with CRS several years ago because their excellent performing arts program, directed by Christopher Pelham, is one of a handful of organizations (along with Cave and the Japan Society) regularly presenting  butoh dance, the experimental Japanese performance art that grows out of the work of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno.  I first studied butoh in 1992 (in a workshop at La MaMa Experimental Theatre with Yoko Ashikawa), and have performed and collaborated with many butoh artists since then.  On several occasions I was involved in events at CRS, as a performer, video or light artist, or performance videographer.  Through those events I got to know Chris Pelham and CRS’s founder Yasuko Kasaki, and in 2010 they invited me to exhibit my artwork at CRS.  Last year I blogged about it as an upcoming show and posted a transcript of the interview Yasuko conducted with me at the opening.  In this post I’ll share all the drawings I made specifically for the CRS show, and talk a little about my experience making them.

Healing Circle 1, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Aside from the creative arts programs, CRS is a center for spiritual healing.  Practitioners use visualizations, focused breathing, and meditative mental states to channel and direct energy, much as yogis or martial artists do.  I thought this would be an interesting subject to approach as an artist, so I observed and sketched at some of the healing circles at CRS.  These large ink-brush drawings are based on rough sketches I made on-site.

Healing Circle 2, 2010, by Fred Hatt

It’s been a while since I attended these sessions, and some of the sessions were conducted in Japanese, which I don’t understand, so my memory could be wrong in some details, but I think all the healing sessions began with guided and silent meditation.  I believe there was some private speaking between each healer and his or her receiver.  The person receiving healing would sit meditating in a chair, while the healer would move around them, not touching them, but directing the hands towards various parts of the person’s body as though beaming heat waves at them.  Often the healer would raise one hand towards the sky, connecting to universal energy or Holy Spirit, and face the other hand towards the receiver.

Healing Circle 3, 2010, by Fred Hatt

At other times, a healer would move their hands several inches above the receiver’s body, as though smoothing fabric or combing hair in the air around the receiver.  In this drawing, instead of depicting the healers, I drew the paths of the movements of their hands around the receivers, giving, perhaps, an impression of the patterns of energy the healers perceive or conceive surrounding the body.

Healing Circle 4, 2010, by Fred Hatt

If you know my portraits and figure drawings, you’ll know that I often show “energy lines” or “auras” like this, in work that has nothing to do with spiritual healing.  People sometimes ask me if I can perceive energy, if I really see all the colors I put into my drawings.  I’ll try to answer those questions in this post, the remainder of which is illustrated with my drawings of the hands of various CRS healing practitioners, sketched from life as they sat in meditation.

Blessing, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

I have no sixth sense.  Like anyone else, my eyes perceive only light, and it is through seeing patterns of light that I can discern physical forms and movements.  Through many years of practice in observational drawing, I have trained myself to look with sustained attention, and to notice very subtle variations in form and color.  Through the practice of photography and filmmaking, I have learned a lot about how light works.

Connection, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Science tells us that solid matter is essentially an illusion, that all the diverse substances and objects in the world are just different arrangements of the same fundamental stuff, essentially patterns of energy.  The fundamental particles and forces that make up a blade of grass are the same as those that make a blade of steel, and fire and water are different patterns, not different elements.  We living creatures grow out of chemicals forged in stars, and every breath we breathe contains atoms that have been part of countless other things and beings.

Focus, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Our perception has evolved to show us a world of solid matter and separate objects.  For basic animal functioning, it’s a highly effective way of understanding what is around us, but it is an illusion.  I have made it a project of my life to try to train myself to see through that illusion, to make the unified field of reality not just an intellectual understanding, but a lived experience.  It seemed to me that our default mode of interpreting sensory input is the most powerful impediment to getting the deeper reality of what we know, and that a practice of honing perception might be a fruitful path.  My visual art practices are about learning to see the world in a way that I believe is truer than the default way, and about communicating that vision to others.  To put it simply, I try to perceive physical things, especially the human form, as patterns of energy, rather than as objects.

Heart, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Perhaps some people really can perceive invisible energies directly through the eyes.  Synesthesia is a well-known phenomenon in which sensory pathways get crossed, so that a synesthete might perceive particular musical notes as having colors, for example.  There are many variations of synesthesia, and perhaps seeing auras is a synesthetic phenomenon.  Alternatively, it could be a matter of intuition heightened by imagination – that’s what some who claim to teach clairvoyance seem to be describing.  I don’t know, because I don’t perceive that way, though intuitive imagination is a fundamental aspect of art, mine as much as anyone else’s, and you can see that in these examples especially in the backgrounds, which are essentially imaginative developments around the form of the hands (more on backgrounds later).

Insight, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

Instead, my practice is to try to link the actual mark-making as closely as possible to the act of perceiving.  Ideally, every saccadic glance should be a stroke of the crayon or brush or whatever.  Every mark should move as though it is flowing over the surface it is describing.  The curves and rhythms of the movements of my drawing hand should reflect the patterns of organic growth that create the forms of the body, or whatever else I am drawing.  My aim is to work in the most direct and dynamic way possible, and in that way to achieve an image in which flow IS form.

Light, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

This approach can be steered more toward classical realism, by working to make contours and gradations as accurate as possible to what I see, or it can be steered more toward expressionism, by allowing the marks to be freer and looser – by letting the hand dance on the paper.  It’s like the musical distinction between playing it straight and swinging.  Generally the looser style creates a more immediate impression of energy in the viewer of the drawing.  I find that accuracy of proportion is rather unimportant – if the lines have the flow of life, the drawing has life.

Receiving, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The colors are just exaggerated from what I see.  In the drawing below, for example, I could see in looking at these hands that the knuckles were slightly more reddish than the rest of the skin, and the area around the veins slightly more bluish.  Color perception is highly relativistic anyway – our way of perceiving color is to compare adjacent areas to see how different they are.   In drawing, I often exaggerate these differences.  If I’m going for the more realistic style, I work at neutralizing the extreme colors by layering them with opposing colors, and the end product can look fairly convincing, when the colors combine in the eye.  If I’m being more expressionistic, I like to keep the more extreme color contrasts.

Rest, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

In these drawings, the backgrounds are fanciful abstractions.  Sometimes elements of the real background come into it.  In the drawing above, the river of color underneath the hands contains some forms derived from the wrinkles in the pants of the model, whose hands were resting on her thighs.  More often in these drawings, the backgrounds are made by echoing and extending curves in the subject, making a pattern that derives from the hands but also tries to express something of the intuitive feeling I get from the individual who is posing for me.  This aspect of these drawings really is the imaginative projection I discussed above, but it takes place strictly on the paper – it’s not something I could see without drawing.

Strength, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

I suppose it could be objected that my practice of working as closely as possible to direct perception of the subject, while treating the pictorial background as a projected abstraction, remains a form of separating objects, and therefore does not achieve the vision of unity I described as my ideal.  Alas, my practice doesn’t quite meet my goal.  It’s just the best I’ve been able to do so far in depicting the body as a pattern of energy, and it’s still a work in progress.

Warmth, Healing Hands series, 2010, by Fred Hatt

The “Healing Circle” ink brush drawings are 22.25″ x 30″ (56.5 cm x 76.2 cm).  The “Healing Hands” aquarelle crayon drawings are 18.4″ x 24.5″ (46.7 cm x 62.2 cm).

2011/11/02

Liquid and Linear

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Watercolor — Tags: , , , , , , , — fred @ 17:58

Seated Contrapposto, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Several weeks ago I posted about beginning to experiment with watercolor painting in the life drawing sessions I attend as a regular practice.  Now I have a batch of new watercolor paintings to share.  I’ll write about my experiences with the new (to me) medium, interspersing illustrations more or less randomly.

Yisroel Quick Poses 2, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The classic watercolor approach to the figure is to focus on clear areas of light and dark, infusing color into the shadows using wet-on-wet techniques to achieve luminous softness.  I don’t know of anyone that does that style better than my friend Jacqui Morgan.  I love the way she achieves the look of light reflecting into the shadow areas – click the link on Jacqui’s name to see several examples of what I’m talking about.  But I’m more interested in finding my own style than in imitating something someone else has already mastered.

Think Back, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Over the seventeen years I’ve been attending life drawing sessions, I’ve drawn with pencils, pens, pastels, conté crayons, graphite blocks, markers, and ink and brush.  The medium I really developed was aquarelle crayons.  (Aquarelle is the French word for watercolor, so these crayons contain watercolor pigments and are water-blendable.)  I generally worked on gray or black paper, so I focused primarily on drawing the highlights, letting the ground of the paper represent the shadows.  Watercolor painting essentially demands an opposite approach!

Chin on Knee, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Through the use of dry media I discovered the expressive power of the linear stroke.  These gestural marks are the traces of movement, the movement of my hands as well as the movement of my perception.  I’ve found that the scribbly thicket of lines communicates my way of seeing my subjects as patterns of energy.  The strokes also capture a particular quality of the moment, a mood that may be tranquil, dynamic, sensual, or whatever.  The lines also follow the three-dimensionality of the form, and convey its roundness even in the absence of chiaroscuro lighting.  The expressive line technique should work well with the brush.

Squat, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Dry media such as the aquarelle crayons cannot be mixed on a palette, but must be combined directly on the paper.  Essentially, the pigments remain separate but are close enough together that they blend in the eye.  It should be possible to do that in paint, too, though so far I haven’t yet figured out how to get the highly saturated watercolor hues to blend into really convincing realistic colors.

James, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Over the years I have done a lot of drawing with ink and a brush, and I had certainly noticed that brushstrokes are more expressive than the strokes of a pencil or crayon.  Crayons are simple – relatively easy to control, dumb, but direct.  I barely think about them when I’m using them.  The relationship of brush to paper and brush to liquid is complex, with small variations in pressure, angle, and wetness making a huge difference in the quality of the marks.  I find I must place more of my mental awareness in the brush itself, because the subtleties of its caress are so magnified on the paper.

Seize, 2011, by Fred Hatt

As you can see, I’ve been trying to adapt my scribbly linear style to watercolor painting.  I still consider these paintings a beginner’s attempts in this direction.  It’s exciting for me to challenge myself with an unfamiliar medium, and interesting to see how techniques with which I’d achieved a certain facility become crude or experimental when transposed to watercolors.

Lumbar Hands, 2011, by Fred Hatt

In sketching quick two-minute poses with watercolor, the technique of focusing on the light/dark divisions works well, and actually seems to capture the quality of the pose more efficiently than the contour-based approach I tend to use when drawing with pencils or pens.

James Qucik Poses 1, 2011, by Fred Hatt

James Quick Poses 2, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Watercolor paints are transparent.  Highlights are achieved by leaving the paper unpainted, and light values of colors by using very thin washes of color, or, in my linear style, thin meshes of colored lines with a lot of white in between.  For me, this has been the most challenging aspect of the medium.  Occasionally I’ve cheated by using white aquarelle crayons to open up highlights or to “erase” errors or washes that become too dark.

Gathered, 2011, by Fred Hatt

I’ve also sometimes used light-colored crayons to make a rough sketch on the paper before beginning to apply paint.  This allows me to use my accustomed loose-handed way of establishing overall proportions and spatial relationships before laying down paint that may be difficult or impossible to correct.

Upward Recline, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Sometimes a very simple approach is most effective.  I think I have a tendency to overwork things.  Watercolor seems to shine with a minimalist style.

Bow & Kneel, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The portrait below may be the closest I’ve gotten to duplicating my crayon style in paint.

Donna, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The colors of the watercolor paintings look a bit more intense in these photos than they do in the originals.  Even photographing these requires a different approach than photographing the crayon drawings!  But since I switched from cheap watercolors to higher-end paints, the colors are highly saturated.  I think I need to figure out how to neutralize them.

Torso on Folded Legs, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Sometimes I’ve tried a more expressionistic approach to both the colors and the strokes.  That seems to work to give a feeling for emotion and character.

Puppet Maker, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Melancholy, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The model for the drawing above is Claudia, the Museworthy blogger.  She’s got a post coming soon that features artwork by the many talented artists that know her through her blog or through her work as a model.  I’ll have a piece in it, and I’ll add a link here as soon as it’s up.  I’ll close this post with another watercolor of Claudia.

Claudia, 2011, by Fred Hatt

All the paintings in this post are watercolor on paper, either 15″ x 20″ (38 x 51 cm) or 11″ x 14″ (28 x 36 cm).

2011/10/11

Sowing Seeds

Filed under: Abstract Art,Art and Philosophy — Tags: , , , — fred @ 22:41

Twixt, 2011, by Fred Hatt

How do you make change in the world?  Even I, who love finding beauty amid the world’s insanity and squalor, yearn for a kinder and juster culture.  Does art have any part in that, or is it just entertainment, an idle pastime of the privileged?  You surely see a lot of contemporary art that addresses injustice, stigma, corruption, exploitation, and violence.  But doesn’t much of that kind of art seem exploitive itself?  During a recent museum visit I saw mural-sized photos of homeless people in humiliating positions, and installations that made real footage of war and prison killings look like video games.  Do you suppose these works will change the minds of the powerful or offer any solace to the souls with whose real suffering they toy?  Do the artists who do this work or the curators who put it on display imagine that they are displaying a social conscience?  Ah, the abject of the world, the war-scarred, the enslaved – let them eat critical theory!

Perhaps it is pretentious for an artist even to pretend to care.  Social change is a complex phenomenon involving myriad conflicting and interacting forces.  The power that an artist has to influence the process of change in society would seem like the power of a mosquito to change the course of an ocean liner.  Even the mass-produced forms of entertainment such as movies and pop music no longer reach the vast audiences they once did.  The kind of art that shows in galleries or alternative performance venues, reaching a minuscule audience, must surely have no impact at all.

Ovum, 2011, by Fred Hatt

People think that the kind of power that produces change must be a direct push.  Huge advertising campaigns, political activism, legal crusades, large-scale economic offenses such as boycotts and buyouts, military or revolutionary attacks are all attempts to leverage monetary, demographic, or violent power to change things in a direct way.  History shows us that such efforts tend to produce unintended consequences such as political backlash movements or power vacuums that allow ruthless people to seize control.  There is a physical law that states that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, and this often seems to apply to clashing cultural forces as well.

There is a different way of producing change, which may be described by the metaphor of planting seeds.  A seed is a tiny thing which contains the potential for the development of a tree or plant.  In nature, plants have various ways of scattering their seeds widely.  Most seeds will not find the conditions necessary to become a mature plant, but enough may grow to perpetuate and even increase the range of the plant that produced them.  Each seed begins to develop in darkness and obscurity and there is no way to see that it is growing until it is emerging into the world as a fresh new manifestation of life.  The very obscurity and indirectness of this process may make change that overcomes the reactionary recoil effect.

Radia, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The metaphor of the seed appears in a famous parable of Jesus, quoted here from the Gospel of Thomas, translated by Patterson and Robinson:

Look, a sower went out. He filled his hands (with seeds), (and) he scattered (them).
Some fell on the path, and the birds came and pecked them up.
Others fell on the rock, and did not take root in the soil, and they did not put forth ears.
And others fell among the thorns, they choked the seeds, and worms ate them.
And others fell on good soil, and it produced good fruit.
It yielded sixty per measure and one hundred twenty per measure.

In the canonical gospels, the seed is interpreted as representing the word of Christ, which may or may not take root in the hearts of those who hear it, but I think it works well as a wider metaphor of how the world works.  It even describes the evolution of species, in which mutations are scattered haphazardly like seeds, most fail, but a few find the conditions to flourish.  A process that might seem random and wasteful is the process that produces our world with all its wondrous variety.

Umbilicus, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Culture, too, is a seeding process.  In the internet era, an idea or style that sprouts and spreads in the culture is called a meme, and its explosive growth is called “going viral” (reminding us that a virus is also a kind of seed, and that the effects of a seed are not necessarily positive).  But viral memes are not all lolcats – Steve Jobs’ vision of friendly technology and Gandhi’s vision of nonviolent resistance are also powerful viral memes.

In a human life, anything that one does or says, demonstrates or communicates to others, may become a seed.  An artist plays with perception, expression, ideas, experience, and desires, and shares the products of this play with others.  An image, an idea, or a feeling thus communicated may connect with the receiver on a deep level.  Whether it stays in the memory or in the unconscious, it may later affect the receiver’s actions or thinking in some way.  At this point the seed is sprouting.

Elaborating on the metaphor, we could say that we are always scattering seeds.  Anything we say or do could be a seed.  Most of our deeds will amount to nothing, but occasionally something will take root.  We can’t know which of our actions or words will sprout, but we should be aware that some will.  We can’t check to see what is growing – the process of development begins in obscurity, and digging up a seed to check on its development may halt that development.  We should act as though everything we do is a seed of goodness, and we should let go of everything we do, trusting that the unpredictable process of the world will nourish and grow some of them.

Vortex, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Real change takes root over long periods of time, cumulatively growing from innumerable such seemingly insignificant experiences and actions of vast numbers of people.  This way of producing change through seeds requires faith.  One doesn’t seem to be changing or moving anything, and often doesn’t even perceive the invisible reactions that may show that the seeds are sprouting.  The power of this way of producing change lies in its invisibility, because since it seems to be nothing it provokes no reactionary counterpunch.

While artists may often engage in direct efforts to change people’s minds, even art which has no outwardly apparent political or intellectual content may be planting seeds.  Some art which does not seem to be making any statement may be an exploration of pure perception.  Since the way people perceive the world alters the way they experience and interact with it, something which expands or alters someone’s way of perceiving something even in a subtle way may be a powerful seed for change.

The illustrations for this post are watercolor on paper,  11″ x 14″ or 28 x 35.6 cm.

2011/09/20

A Toe in the Water

Filed under: Drawing: Experimenting,Figure Drawing: Watercolor — Tags: , , , , , — fred @ 13:24

Sketch with watercolors and brush, 2011, by Fred Hatt

I’ve been doing art sessions with a good friend’s seven year old daughter.  She wanted to learn about painting and I thought pan watercolors would be a good medium to start with – vivid colors, cheap, and not too messy.  Sharing her beginner’s joy with watercolors inspired me to try working with pan watercolors in the life drawing sessions I attend regularly, and in this post I’ll share some of the results from my first two weeks of struggling with this medium, which I have never before attempted to master.

Many of my readers are art students, so this blog is my platform to be a teacher.  I supervise an uninstructed weekly life drawing session at Spring Studio in New York.  A lot of older, experienced artists attend the session regularly.  Many of them have done life drawing or painting practice for decades.  I’ve noticed that while nearly all of them have a pretty good style and technique, most long ago settled into a comfortable rut.  They stopped when they got good, kept doing what worked for them, and haven’t learned anything new in a long time.  There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but the magic of art as a practice is that it is possible to keep it growing and expanding for a lifetime, and they’re missing out on that.

In this blog I always urge pushing the envelope, going out of your comfort zone, being willing to fail.  I often try different drawing materials and techniques for quick drawings, work on varying scale, and experiment in various ways.  But in my developed drawings I too could be accused of working the comfortable rut.  I developed my technique of drawing with aquarelle crayons on gray or black paper a long time ago.  It’s a great way of working, perfectly suited to my strengths and tendencies, and difficult for other people to copy.  I can easily vary the technique to make it more impressionistic or expressionistic or stylized or classical.  I’ve made the medium my own.

But once you’ve mastered something it may be time to move on to something that remains a challenge, to get back to the Zen ideal of “beginner’s mind”.  Watercolor struck me as an ideal challenge, because it goes against almost everything I love about the crayon technique.

With the crayons, I start with a dark ground and build from the highlights first.  With watercolors, the paper is white and paint can only make it darker.  With crayons, my focus is bold, linear, gestural.  Watercolors are soft by nature, and intensity is only achieved by incremental washing.  With crayons, I use additive, optical mixing of colors.  With watercolors, colors blend subtractively.  My style of drawing is to dive in spontaneously and then to work towards correcting mistakes in subsequent layers.  Watercolors are transparent, making it nearly impossible to correct things by going over them.

Companheiros, 2011, by Fred Hatt

In quick drawings, one minute to five minutes, I’m still drawing with my flowy linear style.  The watercolor brush is far more responsive to touch than a pencil or pen.  Speed and pressure affect line thickness, but density also varies according to the ratio of water and pigment in the brush, and whether the brush dashes quickly or lingers as it moves.

Stepping Forward, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Here are two beautifully expressive quick poses from my great friend Claudia, the Museworthy blogger.

Onde, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Compared to a pen, pencil, or crayon, the brush is hard to control.  There’s almost no friction – it’s like walking on wet ice.

Réveil, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Here are some ten and twenty minute watercolor sketches from the sessions at Brooklyn’s Figureworks Gallery, with the wonderfully idiosyncratic models Taylor and Jillian.

Lying on Side, 2011, by Fred Hatt

I’m still more or less drawing with the brush.  Some watercolor painters use watercolor-specific techniques like letting the paint infuse into pre-wetted paper.  So far, I’m using regular inexpensive sketch paper and painting “wet on dry”.

Supplicant, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Maybe with tube watercolors you can get deep colors right out of the tube.  With these pan watercolors every color goes on pretty thin, and then gets even lighter as it dries.  You have to paint multiple layers to get any density.  This may be a good thing, since there’s no erasing.

Rayon Vert, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The dryer I can keep the brush, the more controllable the line is.  By combining wet and dry application I can use some of my pencil drawing techniques but also blended shading.

Tea Drinker, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Little touches of color can suggest area color without filling it in.

Vanquished, 2011, by Fred Hatt

On the one below, I lightly sketched in the figure with crayons, then used watercolor for the shading and colors.  The foreshortening of the right leg at the bottom of the page is a bit awkward here, but the torso is wonderfully present.

Rêverie, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Just this week I tried for the first time using watercolors for a long pose at the three-hour session I supervise at Spring Studio on Monday mornings.  I allowed myself to use crayons for the initial rough sketch, and to sharpen highlights and shadows at the end of the session, but besides those small touches, this is all watercolor.

Športnik, 2011, by Fred Hatt

I was getting a little too adept at crayon drawing.  Working with watercolors, I’m struggling again, and it feels good.  I think I’ll keep working with this medium for a while, so expect to see more here, perhaps mixed in with crayon drawings.

All the pieces in this post are 18″ x 24″, pan watercolors (sometimes with aquarelle crayon) on paper.

2011/08/22

Curiosity as Cure

Filed under: Abstract Art,Art and Philosophy — Tags: , , , , — fred @ 15:29

Sound Suit, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Sometimes there’s something I’d like to write about, but I don’t have good visuals to accompany it.  And sometimes I have images I’d like to share, but can’t think of much to say about them.  I’ve always considered the combination of words and pictures to be the essence of Drawing Life as a blog.  Here I’m going to talk about some ideas that are close to the heart of my artist’s philosophy, my intuitive sense of the moment we humans find ourselves in.  I’ll intersperse these ideas with some of my recent doodles.  There’s no direct correspondence between the pictures and the words, except of course that doodling is what I often do while listening to someone drone on and on, and if I’m going to drone on in text, I may as well break up the words with some of my wiggly, loopy lines.

Multitask, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

In 1999-2000, the American Museum of Natural History in New York hosted a temporary exhibit called “Body Art:  Marks of Identity”.  It was a survey of tattooing, piercing, scarification, body painting and other kinds of body modification across many cultures and through history.  My friend Matty Jankowski, a tattoo artist and a collector and scholar of materials and artifacts related to the history of body arts, was one of the consultants to the curators of the exhibit.  Thanks to Matty, a few of my own body painting images were included in a portion of the show devoted to contemporary body art.

Herald Angel, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Matty also worked with the education department of the museum to present some special programs.  One day there was a kind of open house for the public to learn about body art from artists.  There was a henna artist, a tattooist, a piercer, and I was there as a body painter.  There was a slide show, and all of the artists gave brief presentations on their particular crafts.  People attending the workshop were given the opportunity to try out an electric tattoo needle on a honeydew melon.  The henna artist and I had our materials on hand to give temporary body art to anyone who wanted it.

Bug & Oak, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

There were a lot of parents with young kids at the event, and many of them formed an orderly queue at my body painting table.  Most of my previous experience of body painting was with adults, in my own studio or in art galleries or performance settings, but that day I had a long line of little kids, with their parents, waiting their turn.  As I was painting, I heard the parents talking to their kids:  “What do you want?  Just think about what you want and tell the man what you want?  You can get whatever you want.  Do you want a butterfly?  Do you want a dragon?  Decide what you want and the man will paint it for you.”  Kids were presenting their tiny arms and asking me to paint Furbys or Pokemon characters I’d never seen before.  A small minority, maybe one in ten, would show some curiosity, would ask questions about my paints or my experiences painting people, or would say, “Just paint whatever comes to you,” or “Go wild.”

Cornucopia, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Listening to the endless litany of “What do you want?”, I realized that indoctrination into the consumer mindset wasn’t just accomplished through TV commercials and mass marketing campaigns bankrolled by multinational megacorporations.  Parents were actively programming their kids to the idea that everything was about consumer choice and acquisition, about defining desires and having those desires satisfied.  Even such an odd experience as having a strange artist paint on your arm or hand or cheek was reduced to choosing a brand and displaying it.

Sole & Canopy, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Recall that the name of the exhibit was “Body Art:  Marks of Identity.”  The thesis of the curators was that body art was used to mark its wearer as a member of a tribe, to indicate a special cultural role such as warrior or bride.  These children, under the relentless prodding of their parents, were engaging in the modern form of this practice, something the commercial world calls “branding”.  (Of course the term derives from the practice of searing a mark of ownership into the hide of a livestock animal.)  We are encouraged to define ourselves by our choice of symbols, corporate logos, or popular culture.  It is no longer so much about our role in society, but about our status as consumers.

Cretan Goddess, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

The curious minority in my body painting queue hadn’t been steered to see every opportunity as a consumer choice or a branding of their identity.  They saw this as a chance to experience something fresh, to learn something new.

Coral, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

The consumer mindset says “The one who dies with the most toys wins.”  It’s a zero-sum game, a world of winners and losers.  The curious mindset says “We live in a world of inexhaustible wonders.  What will I experience today?”  It is a world of free play, a world of abundance for all.  It is not a zero-sum game because it’s oriented towards experience, not ownership.  One who collects experiences does not deny them to others.

Bicycle, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

We humans are now in the early stages of a great crisis.  The industrial revolution of the past three centuries has allowed the human population to increase tenfold (it has more than doubled just in my lifetime), and has provided to the common person comforts and luxuries once reserved for kings, even luxuries unimagined by kings.  All of this was made possible by fossil fuels – hundreds of millions of years worth of stored energy expended in an explosive orgy – and by an economic system in which constant increase is the only definition of wealth.  For a few centuries it worked, because there were always new natural resources to be discovered, always undeveloped places to develop and unexploited markets to expand into.

Beatrice, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Alas, we are now coming to that inevitable point where the exponential growth curve must become a bell curve, leveling off and sloping back down, if we are to survive.  The earth itself is beginning to assert its limits, to push back against unchecked growth.  Climate change and resource depletion are becoming costly problems that cannot be solved by ever more spending and extraction and ever more complicated technology.  Our economic system, based on lending at interest, needs constant growth, but facing the slowing of real expansion, it is now just blowing bubbles.  The owners of great wealth are trying to hold onto what they have by no longer sharing their bounty with the masses, but this strategy may ultimately fail too, as wealth defined as growth evaporates when growth stops.

Pipe Organ, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Everyone is in denial now, imagining that there is something that will make the material economy grow again.  But we don’t need more growth.  Human population increase needs to slow down.  Expansion in the per capita consumption of energy and natural resources needs to slow down and even begin to contract.  From the standpoint of the capitalist economy, the slowdown of growth is a dire crisis and even a disaster.  From the standpoint of planetary health, the slowdown of growth is an essential correction.

Eye Pop & Face Slap, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

A child’s body grows by leaps and bounds, but when maturity is reached, physical growth slows and stops.  Getting bigger is for childhood, but in adulthood it gives way to spiritual and mental development.  Wisdom, skill and knowledge, the immaterial aspects of the living being, can expand for a lifetime.  Unchecked growth of the organs and tissues in an adult is cancer.

Merkin Raygun, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

There is now widespread agreement that we need to find “sustainable” technologies and ways of life.  Many still seem reluctant to see that a sustainable economy must be a steady-state economy, not one based on constant growth, at least not as regards population and conversion of raw materials into stuff and stuff into trash.

Insect, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

The consumer/industrial economy says profits must get ever bigger.  Every generation must have more material wealth than the one before.  Our stores have become superstores, our houses mansions, our cars trucks, and our bodies obese.

Spaghetti Structure, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Marketing propaganda is so pervasive in our culture that we internalize it.  We base our sense of identity on our consumer choices, and raise our children to be good consumers above all.

Winehouse, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Our highest value is choice.  We associate choice with democracy and the modern way of life.  We have so many choices now we may feel paralyzed by indecision.  Constantly making choices gives us a limited kind of freedom, but it is constrained by the options that are offered to us:  Democrat or Republican, Wal-Mart or Target, paper or plastic.   The more we are focused on these choices the more we can be prevented from imagining what other possibilities are not being put before us.  The more we define ourselves by choices the more we box ourselves into categories the marketers can exploit.

Nutcracker, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

The curious mind is always wide open, finding interest and beauty in whatever it encounters.  It is always engaged with the unknown, asking questions, speculating, wondering.  The curious mind moves through the world on an exploratory path, following beauty and seeking knowledge.  The curious mind tries to maximize flexibility and avoid being boxed in.

Fruit Tree, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Our civilization faces a difficult period as natural limits awaken us from our dream of opulent consumption.  There will be a period of denial, recrimination, rage.  Those of us who have devoted our lives to curiosity and creativity already know there are pleasures deeper and more satisfying than those offered by consumerism.

Secret Language, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

Even as we are forced to cut back, to use less energy and less materials, even as extravagant materialism slips out of the grasp of most people, opportunities for learning and experience will remain abundant.  Creative minds that can ask penetrating questions and imagine fresh solutions will be needed by all.  Curiosity and creativity will see us through stormy times.

 

Stealth, 2011, doodle by Fred Hatt

The doodles that illustrate this post were all made in the last few months.  All are made with Tombow brush markers on letter-sized printer paper.

 

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