It
may seem odd that Walter Hatke, who endlessly exhorts his students to pay
attention to the details of the human form, has scarcely any people in his
own works. It's a little bit like ee cummings preaching the importance
of grammar and punctuation.
“What I'm after usually has more to do with the
light and those quiet moments than any (human figure) can express,”
says Hatke, the May I. Baker Professor of Fine Arts. “It's more
contemplative or meditative in a way. A figure adds a whole new dynamic
that I'm not particularly interested in.”
“Walter Hatke: Paintings, Drawings &
Prints” opens Thursday, Jan. 13, at 4:30 p.m. in the Nott Memorial's
Mandeville Gallery.
Hatke, who fell in love with Virginia Woolf's To
the Lighthouse for the way she described rooms as having lives of
their own, conveys in his own works small traces of humanity. “I like
to give the sense that someone is about to open a door and walk into a
room or has just stepped out for a moment,” he admits.
On the rare occasion that the human form finds its way
into his works, it is usually as a small element to balance a painting. In
his just-finished Trestle, for example, Hatke called on his
17-year-old son, Graham, to stand in “as a small compositional
note.”
Hatke describes his works as “a combination of
light and moments of time put together, sometimes with some deceitful
chicanery.” Among his “deceitful chicanery,” autumn leaves
and blossoming day lilies in the same painting, a blue boat in Trestle
(a tip of the hat to Winslow Homer's classic Blue Boat) and a
crucifix (or is it simply a telephone pole?) in the lower right corner of Knolls,
a painting that depicts a glowing sky over a small slice of the
industrial horizon of the Knolls Atomic Power Lab in Niskayuna. (Knolls,
featured in a recent Mandeville show, is not slated for the current
exhibition.)
If his landscapes – Knolls, for example –
seem to pay homage to the 17th century Dutch painters, Hatke attributes
his “Netherlandish” tendency to his love of the sky – the
clouds, the air, the colors, the sunlight. “We look at the sky a lot
in the Midwest,” says Hatke, a native of Kansas. “We paid a lot
of attention to atmosphere and the air. We could see storms coming for
days.” When Hatke lived in New York City and Pennsylvania, the sky
took on different features in his works. Once in Schenectady, he found
himself incorporating the sky, much as did Thomas Cole, Frederic Church
and other Hudson River painters.
Hatke paints daily for about eight hours, taking two or
three months for most works. By the time he is finished, “I've had
my fill and I'm happy to see them go,” he says. “Like kids,
you want them to grow up, go off and find a happy home.”
Hatke's day begins with a half-hour workout on the
rowing machine in his home studio. As he rows, he stares at the opposite
wall, drawing inspiration as the morning sun arcs across the objects on
the wall. Many of his interiors – often simple household objects –
were born in these morning workouts.
From R.S. is a painting of a metered postage label. Tacked to
his studio walls for years, it had begun to fade. It just struck me one
day that I needed to make a painting about that. The label arrived on a
package from the late Robert Schoelkopf, a close friend and New York City
gallery director, whom Hatke says was “very non-chalant about the
business of art” and who “would support artists to the very end.”
Next to the postmark are the words “Art Saves Lives,” words that have
become important to Hatke. “Art has saved my life more than once,” he
says. “It saves lives in a spiritual kind of way. It's something that
is intrinsically life giving.”
Hatke, who has taught at Union since 1986, earned his bachelor's
degree from DePauw University, and his master's and MFA degrees from the
University of Iowa. His works have appeared recently in the John Pence
Gallery, San Francisco; Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe; and at MB
Modern Gallery in New York.
Hatke, who has taught at Union since 1986, earned his
bachelor's degree from DePauw University, and his master's and MFA
degrees from the University of Iowa. His works have appeared recently in
the John Pence Gallery, San Francisco; Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe;
and at MB Modern Gallery in New York.
“Walter Hatke: Paintings, Drawings & Prints” includes about 40
works by the artist over the last 30 years. The exhibition runs through
March 14 in the Nott Memorial's Mandeville Gallery.