{"id":1249,"date":"2010-03-29T18:55:37","date_gmt":"2010-03-29T23:55:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fredhatt.com\/blog\/?p=1249"},"modified":"2014-12-14T21:07:13","modified_gmt":"2014-12-15T02:07:13","slug":"reverse-engineering-a-drawing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fredhatt.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/29\/reverse-engineering-a-drawing\/","title":{"rendered":"Reverse Engineering a Drawing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Twists, 2010 by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

Reverse engineering is taking something apart to find out how it was put together.\u00a0 The term usually applies to technology or manufactured products, particularly in the case of competitors seeking to discover trade secrets or make knockoffs.\u00a0 I’ve never heard the phrase applied to an artwork, but a drawing or painting does conceal stages of construction.\u00a0 In my last post<\/a> I wrote about artist William Kentridge.\u00a0 His method of charcoal drawing animation<\/a> reveals the drawings he exhibits as processes of exploration and development.<\/p>\n

Over the last seven years I’ve been making large-scale drawings with multiple overlapping figures.\u00a0 Each of these is created in close collaboration with a single model.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Many examples, and an explanation of the process, can be found in this gallery<\/a> on my portfolio site, and others in the blog posts “Time and Line”<\/a>.\u00a0 The stages of development of a chaos composition are shown in the post “Composing on the Fly”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“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.\u00a0 Figurative elements are clearly visible, but the overlapping is dense enough that much of it is essentially abstract.\u00a0 Different colors are used in different figures, making it possible to discern connected parts of individual figures by following lines of certain colors.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Figure 1, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Below, two figures from the left side of the picture.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Figure 2, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Figure 3, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Toward the middle of the piece, there are several more dramatic poses.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Figure 4, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Figure 5, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

The figure below is particularly hidden.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Figure 6, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

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.\u00a0 The model was twisting and leaning to her left side, so the angle of view appears to be from below.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Figure 7, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

The figure below is in the upper right corner and has much less overlapping than the central figures.\u00a0 This pose is a complex sculptural arrangement of counterbalanced curves.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Figure 8, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

In the middle of the composition is this standing figure, which is ghostly and hard to see.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Figure 9, from Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

Now that you’ve seen the drawing deconstructed, look again at the final version.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is a picture of energy, a sketch of a single figure moving in time and space, an attempt to see in four dimensions.\u00a0 I hope that the total is more than the sum of its parts.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Twists, 2010, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

Thanks again to Madelyn, the model for this piece, a fine model and a great creative collaborator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reverse engineering is taking something apart to find out how it was put together.\u00a0 The term usually applies to technology or manufactured products, particularly in the case of competitors seeking to discover trade secrets or make knockoffs.\u00a0 I’ve never heard the phrase applied to an artwork, but a drawing or painting does conceal stages of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[209],"tags":[133,19,17,270,44,21,22],"class_list":["post-1249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-figure-drawing-developed-work","tag-art-modeling","tag-crayons","tag-figures","tag-movement-drawing","tag-nudes","tag-process","tag-technique"],"yoast_head":"\nReverse Engineering a Drawing - 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