{"id":3593,"date":"2012-03-06T20:38:26","date_gmt":"2012-03-07T01:38:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fredhatt.com\/blog\/?p=3593"},"modified":"2014-12-15T00:07:18","modified_gmt":"2014-12-15T05:07:18","slug":"in-the-flow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fredhatt.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/06\/in-the-flow\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Flow"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Art Seeds performance drawing #4, \u00a030 seconds, 2012, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

A drawing or painting is an object, an arrangement of marks on a surface, inert and mute. \u00a0So what do we mean when we speak of a picture having dynamism or tension, energy or lyricism? \u00a0There could be multiple factors. \u00a0Movement may be pictorially implied. \u00a0Shapes and colors may be arranged in ways that suggest rhythmic repetition or create tensions of weight or light that, like certain chords in music, predict a resolving change.<\/p>\n

For me, the most direct path to capturing energy in pictorial visual art is simply to approach drawing or painting as an art of movement. \u00a0The brush strokes or pencil marks are tracings of the movement of the artist’s hand. \u00a0The hand dances what the eyes see or what the spirit feels. \u00a0Movement is the most direct way of expressing grace or violence, serenity or frolic. \u00a0A drawing doesn’t move, but it is a product of movement. \u00a0The kinetics of its making affect the quality of its marks in a way that viewers can feel.<\/p>\n

Direct gestural expression is something drawing and painting have that still photography generally lacks. \u00a0For me, that’s a compelling reason to focus on that aspect of art, in this age glutted with mechanically reproduced images.<\/p>\n

A longstanding exercise for me is sketching dancers as they move<\/a>. \u00a0It’s one of those things that’s almost impossible to do, like getting a sweet sound out of a violin, and for that reason a great thing to practice, practice, practice. \u00a0In this post I’ll share a few recent examples of the rough and spontaneous results of this pursuit.<\/p>\n

The thirty-second ink-brush drawing that heads this post was made during a recent performance<\/a> organized by my friend the dancer Kayoko Nakajima. \u00a0She and Carly Czach performed improvised dance in timed intervals, interspersed with similarly timed intervals in which several artists made drawings in response to the movement they’d just witnessed. \u00a0Kayoko’s blog for the project<\/a> shows the resulting drawings of four artists (including me), and the following video by Charles Dennis<\/a> shows excerpts from the performance, so you can get an idea what the dance was like and how the audiences watched the drawing as well as the dance.
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