Feature in the Flagstaff Live, Cover Story
Illustrating the Unknown
Artist Adrian Hatfield encounters the mysterious and the sublime
By Stephanie Flood
Published on 08/14/2008
“The infinite universe stands second perhaps only to our own consciousness as the greatest mystery of our empirical experience. Unlike God, the vastness of space is an undeniable, observable reality …” So says Adrian Hatfield’s artist statement. “Much like a child looking over the side of a boat into the vastness of the deep ocean, we may make a discovery or two, but the greatest realization is how little we can perceive, and how small we are in relation to what we are observing.”
There are gaps along the road of human comprehension people have learned to fill with imagination. Scientists document facts and evidence into graphs, formulas or theories, using science as a language to ascend the barriers of the unknown. Artists do the same, as they create in order to interpret the unexplainable into images or objects that can be grasped by human understanding.
Adrian Hatfield, an artist exhibiting a series of sublime, conceptual pieces at the Northern Arizona University Art Museum, combines both processes of science and art to interpret the vastness of the universe and its marvels. Hatfield’s past study of paleontology, astronomy and oceanography united with his devotion to art and created a 15-year endeavor that both explores and creates questions of the unknown.
“What I really have tried to focus on was the visual language science uses to convey information,” Hatfield says. “And also how creative decisions and aesthetics fill in so many of the gaps that we don’t know … But for example, if a scientific illustrator is doing an illustration of a dinosaur, he has a very limited amount of knowledge. So everything else—their color, whether they had head feathers are if they didn’t have feathers—a lot of the aspects of it are just made up by the artist.”
His collages undergo a human struggle as they capture the intoxicating and illustrious beauty of the intangible, or rather, the sublime—referring to a greatness that cannot be quantified.
“I think the sublime is tied in to all this stuff,” Hatfield says. “What the sublime is has evolved over the years. Different people have different takes on it. But commonly, it deals with looking at something so enormous that it overloads your senses. Like you can’t take it in, or you can’t comprehend it. Like you try to imagine that the universe goes on forever.”
Throughout history, philosophers, writers, scientists and artists dedicated their lives to capturing the nature of the sublime and Hatfield aims to pick up where they left their pencils and paints.
“The sublime landscape painters kind of had a very similar role to a scientist,” Hatfield says. “They’re taking this imminently large subject matter and trying to bring it down to something that is manageable, so we could deal with it. So if you go to a museum and you see painting that is 12 feet long, and 8 feet tall, it’s an amazing accomplishment. And it’s almost unbelievable that a person was able to do that. But then when you compare it to the Grand Canyon, or the mountain that they were trying to capture, I mean, then it’s just an insignificant little thing.”
One of Hatfield’s collages reaches for the boundlessness of the ocean depths. It is explained in various blue tones and patterns that create dark and light dimensions. The piece represents Hatfield’s experience scuba diving in Central America, with glitter sparkling within the layered resin adding to the aesthetic richness Hatfield strives to achieve with a celebratory intent.
“I swam out near the drop off,” Hatfield says. “And I don’t know how many hundreds of feet I went down. But I was floating there, and I looked down, I looked out, and I looked up and everything just disappeared in the blue … and as I was floating there, all of a sudden, this really large animal came just in my field of vision to where I could see that there was a large animal there, but not close enough to where I could identify it. I was terrified, but the whole experience was really beautiful too. So I got back to the boat, and over the next few weeks I decided that I wanted to make a piece about it. And just like the sublime landscape painters, the idea of capturing that is really impossible. So I decided to give it my best shot.”
Another painting of Hatfield’s presents a mystic blue curtain with wallpaper patterns in the background. A bowerbird hovers in the middle as it unveils a breathtaking view of the perceived sublime awash in intoxicating red and gold. Interestingly enough, the actual bowerbird builds houses of twigs and decorates them with bright, shiny objects to seduce and impress females.
“There’s something that I think is really amazing about that,” Hatfield says. “It really seems like there’s aesthetic positions happening. I love that, because first it completely confounds our ideas of animals and how they think. That alone is amazing, but it’s also a great metaphor as why we as artists make art in terms of communicating with other people.”
Although visually uncomplicated at first, upon closer inspection the wallpaper patterns are also cut-outs of star charts that are simplified in the natural forms of leaves and flowers. It is the meaning behind the rich oil painting’s designs that Hatfield means to express.
And it is the unveiling of the sublime that creates the true nature of Hatfield’s work, amplified with the use of bright colors, fantastic patterns and romantic landscapes that allure and capture viewers into silence.
Adrian Hatfield’s exhibit, “Suitable Illusions,” will be on display at the NAU Art Museum until Sat, Sept. 27 with a closing reception to be held Thu, Sept. 25. For more information, call the museum at 523-3471 or visit www4.nau.edu/art_museum. To see more of Hatfield’s work, visit his Web site at http://www.adrianhatfield.com/.
Artist Adrian Hatfield encounters the mysterious and the sublime
By Stephanie Flood
Published on 08/14/2008
“The infinite universe stands second perhaps only to our own consciousness as the greatest mystery of our empirical experience. Unlike God, the vastness of space is an undeniable, observable reality …” So says Adrian Hatfield’s artist statement. “Much like a child looking over the side of a boat into the vastness of the deep ocean, we may make a discovery or two, but the greatest realization is how little we can perceive, and how small we are in relation to what we are observing.”
There are gaps along the road of human comprehension people have learned to fill with imagination. Scientists document facts and evidence into graphs, formulas or theories, using science as a language to ascend the barriers of the unknown. Artists do the same, as they create in order to interpret the unexplainable into images or objects that can be grasped by human understanding.
Adrian Hatfield, an artist exhibiting a series of sublime, conceptual pieces at the Northern Arizona University Art Museum, combines both processes of science and art to interpret the vastness of the universe and its marvels. Hatfield’s past study of paleontology, astronomy and oceanography united with his devotion to art and created a 15-year endeavor that both explores and creates questions of the unknown.
“What I really have tried to focus on was the visual language science uses to convey information,” Hatfield says. “And also how creative decisions and aesthetics fill in so many of the gaps that we don’t know … But for example, if a scientific illustrator is doing an illustration of a dinosaur, he has a very limited amount of knowledge. So everything else—their color, whether they had head feathers are if they didn’t have feathers—a lot of the aspects of it are just made up by the artist.”
His collages undergo a human struggle as they capture the intoxicating and illustrious beauty of the intangible, or rather, the sublime—referring to a greatness that cannot be quantified.
“I think the sublime is tied in to all this stuff,” Hatfield says. “What the sublime is has evolved over the years. Different people have different takes on it. But commonly, it deals with looking at something so enormous that it overloads your senses. Like you can’t take it in, or you can’t comprehend it. Like you try to imagine that the universe goes on forever.”
Throughout history, philosophers, writers, scientists and artists dedicated their lives to capturing the nature of the sublime and Hatfield aims to pick up where they left their pencils and paints.
“The sublime landscape painters kind of had a very similar role to a scientist,” Hatfield says. “They’re taking this imminently large subject matter and trying to bring it down to something that is manageable, so we could deal with it. So if you go to a museum and you see painting that is 12 feet long, and 8 feet tall, it’s an amazing accomplishment. And it’s almost unbelievable that a person was able to do that. But then when you compare it to the Grand Canyon, or the mountain that they were trying to capture, I mean, then it’s just an insignificant little thing.”
One of Hatfield’s collages reaches for the boundlessness of the ocean depths. It is explained in various blue tones and patterns that create dark and light dimensions. The piece represents Hatfield’s experience scuba diving in Central America, with glitter sparkling within the layered resin adding to the aesthetic richness Hatfield strives to achieve with a celebratory intent.
“I swam out near the drop off,” Hatfield says. “And I don’t know how many hundreds of feet I went down. But I was floating there, and I looked down, I looked out, and I looked up and everything just disappeared in the blue … and as I was floating there, all of a sudden, this really large animal came just in my field of vision to where I could see that there was a large animal there, but not close enough to where I could identify it. I was terrified, but the whole experience was really beautiful too. So I got back to the boat, and over the next few weeks I decided that I wanted to make a piece about it. And just like the sublime landscape painters, the idea of capturing that is really impossible. So I decided to give it my best shot.”
Another painting of Hatfield’s presents a mystic blue curtain with wallpaper patterns in the background. A bowerbird hovers in the middle as it unveils a breathtaking view of the perceived sublime awash in intoxicating red and gold. Interestingly enough, the actual bowerbird builds houses of twigs and decorates them with bright, shiny objects to seduce and impress females.
“There’s something that I think is really amazing about that,” Hatfield says. “It really seems like there’s aesthetic positions happening. I love that, because first it completely confounds our ideas of animals and how they think. That alone is amazing, but it’s also a great metaphor as why we as artists make art in terms of communicating with other people.”
Although visually uncomplicated at first, upon closer inspection the wallpaper patterns are also cut-outs of star charts that are simplified in the natural forms of leaves and flowers. It is the meaning behind the rich oil painting’s designs that Hatfield means to express.
And it is the unveiling of the sublime that creates the true nature of Hatfield’s work, amplified with the use of bright colors, fantastic patterns and romantic landscapes that allure and capture viewers into silence.
Adrian Hatfield’s exhibit, “Suitable Illusions,” will be on display at the NAU Art Museum until Sat, Sept. 27 with a closing reception to be held Thu, Sept. 25. For more information, call the museum at 523-3471 or visit www4.nau.edu/art_museum. To see more of Hatfield’s work, visit his Web site at http://www.adrianhatfield.com/.