BETWEEN ABSTRACTION AND REPRESENTATION

Essay by J. Susan Isaacs, PhD

Beginnings From her early years, W.A.S. Hatch was fascinated with the relationship between abstract forms in space and intense color and its vibrations. However, she also learned to depict the figure, but with a stylized approach that maintained her commitment to expressing energy through pattern.1 She discovered too a desire to include an underlying personal narrative with her images. As an undergraduate, she studied etching with Syracuse University professor Donald Cortese, who emphasized an energetic upstate New York sketchy sensibility, often with a darker emotional undercurrent. At Pratt, where she earned her graduate degree, she studied with Walter Rogalski who was an accomplished printmaker in several different techniques.

Transition to Professional Artist and Teacher During the 1970s, Hatch successfully entered her work into national and international printmaking competitions. She joined Apocalypse Cooperative Printmaking Studio in Brooklyn, which she describes as epitomizing the “starving artist’s atelier.” In 1973, she was hired to teach etching and lithography at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. Teaching provided her with a well-equipped university print studio and enough funds to set up a home studio as well.

In 1974, she began twelve related prints, which today she identifies as her Face series. Each of the designs includes, as she describes it, the same “Kewpie doll-like face.”2 Hatch appropriated the image from a Village Voice advertisement, reconstituting the Kewpie as a symbol for the empowerment of women. Second- wave feminism began in the early 1960s and became highly visible in the 70s with attempts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. She remembers this series as her own response to the ideas of the growing Women’s Movement. While the subjects are serious, the narratives are playfully expressed.

In Burger Queen, she addressed the fact that women were more financially successful when in charge of their own finances. In Star Mountain, we see the woman atop the mountain, proudly declaring she has reached its pinnacle on her own. Waterworks focused on the many traditional responsibilities women had to shoulder – cooking, cleaning, and laundry – while simultaneously maintaining their sexual appeal.

The Face series was well received, attracting the attention of the Associated American Artist Gallery in New York City, which featured her work in its prestigious 1975 New Talent in Printmaking exhibition.

Gradually her subjects became more personal, drawing inspiration from her daily life. For instance, while working in her home studio, not far from her kitchen and inspired by its contents, she made food her subject, resulting in the Visual Feast series. Some prints are whimsical like Cake, where a dark, male slice of cake gently offers a tulip to the lighter piece of female cake, her femininity indicated by her full red lips. This work is autobiographical and alludes to the artist’s husband extending a peace offering after a disagreement.

As the stages of Hatch’s life evolved, so too did her subjects and her approach to them. Some of her late 1970s prints demonstrate what would become one of her central themes – still life objects that are part of her everyday lived experience. We see the exploration of this in Water Pitcher, a composition that combines wedding gifts, a pitcher, and stemware with an image of the Rocky Mountains, where she and her husband, Denison, hiked during summer trips.

In 1977, Hatch began to experiment in media outside of printmaking, including pastels and papermaking, traveling to Japan, where she collected handmade paper, and working at the Twinrocker handmade paper mill in Brookston, Indiana.3 Papermaking was part of the new Studio Craft movement, when artists, collectors, and galleries worked hard to elevate the status of Craft, wanting it to be afforded the same respect and prices assigned to the Fine Arts.4

NOTES

1. The artist provided information in the summer of 2021 to the author via a zoom interview, two studio visits, and frequent email correspondence.

2. Wendy recalls a framed photo on her father’s dresser of her as a small child with
a round face and curly locks.

3. See the history of Twinrocker Handmade Paper, http://www.twinrocker.com/ Accessed August 12, 2021.

4. The Renwick building was repurposed in 1972 as a branch museum of the Smithsonian. Renamed the Renwick Gallery, it featured American craft, thus recognizing the growing importance of the Studio Craft movement in the United States. “Renwick Gallery Architectural History,” https:// americanart.si.edu/about/ history/renwick-architecture/ Accessed August 10, 2021.