Julian Hatton: From landscape to abstraction

Painter Julian Hatton spoke last night at the NY Studio School about his work, some of which I review here.

Hatton spoke about his experience of nature, frequently invoking his childhood in Michigan, where he said there's about two months of good weather each year. He contrasted the cold, flat landscape there, across the lake from Fond du Lac, with his experiences on the east coast, in Maine, and also in Brittany, France.

He recalled painting in the late winter and early spring in France and seeing how cold the colors in that landscape are. Then, one day in early June, he experienced the entire landscape awakening with color. He connected Bonnard's experience in the north of France with the cold color palette that becomes very warm and intimate. Hatton said he'd never experienced anything like it, and clearly there was an affinity for that liveliness in a cold landscape.

Hatton also talked about coming to New York in 1980 to be a painter. He had studied art history at Harvard and applied to the Studio School, but was first rejected because he didn't have a portfolio. He went to Spain, to live with an artist friend of the family, came back with a portfolio, and was promptly accepted.

He worked for 8 years at the Water's Edge restaurant, fondly recalling the small group of creative people he worked with who were trying to accomplish things outside their night jobs (including a member of the Les Sans Culottes).

Seeing his slides from his student days was seeing a young painter wrestling with his influences and searching for a subject. There was a de Kooning-style abstraction and a realistic painting of a bulldozer.

His restlessness, he says, sent him out to the landscape. He began taking his cigar box of paints on his bicycle and started to paint in the city. He eventually found the pockets of natural life, settling on particular locations in Prospect Park and in a spot beyond Far Rockaway.

He would do variation after variation at the same spot, carrying out "failed" paintings to paint over. Different paintings done of the same view of Prospect Park showed Hatton's yearning to capture his feeling in a particular way. He was searching to capture something, especially from what he called his "special place" in Prospect Park. His work started to get more abstract and lyrical. The green scenes in front of him blossomed into yellows, reds and blues on canvas. Shapes morphed into painterly forms. He had found his subject.

Personally, one of the most interesting things he said was taking critics to task for never talking about color relationships and how colors create space. Sure, we'll talk about the overall palette and describe an aesthetic, but almost no one goes in depth about how colors work on a canvas. How a blue can effect an orange, for example, and then recede into the distance.

I agree with him about critics (especially after looking at my old review of his work) but the answer to the problem was in his own talk. Colors are difficult to understand. As a painter, it takes a lot of trial and error, and as a critic sometimes how colors are working can be even more daunting. The infinite ranges of hue and value and saturation make it difficult to talk in anything but the most general terms, although now I'll consider it a challenge.

Hatton recalled how kids would frequently gather around him in the park while he was painting and talk to him. He never responded, he said, because it would break his concentration. But one day a kid stood behind his canvas and said "Mister, I wish the whole park looked like that."

During Hatton's talk, he showed photographs taken in the places where he has painted, and then would show the canvases painted there. It's not difficult to see why, like the kid over Hatton's shoulder, we sometimes choose art over nature.