BETWEEN ABSTRACTION AND REPRESENTATION

Essay by J. Susan Isaacs, PhD

Transition to Acrylic on Canvas By 2006, W.A.S. Hatch determined that she had accomplished quite a lot in watercolor, and no longer found the medium challenging. At the same time, she refreshed her familiarity with her father-in-law’s collection of early American primitive paintings, including portraits and landscapes, observing that after two or three centuries they were still in good condition while works on paper are much more vulnerable to light and climate than oil on canvas or panel. Moreover, canvases weigh much less than expensive, large, glazed, and framed works on paper and are more easily transported for exhibition. Hatch does not frame her canvases but instead wraps her painting around the edges of the canvas stretcher bars .

Hatch’s decision to go to a medium and process with more longevity was bolstered in 2010, when she inherited a substantial cache of acrylic supplies. A close friend, Robert Anderson, with whom she had shared a graduate studio at Pratt, passed away. Bob was an artist and chemist for the Binney & Smith Company, the manufacturer of Liquitex paints and art supplies, and his New Jersey studio looked like a showroom for these materials. His widow sent Wendy a very large box filled with new acrylic paint, medium, and brushes.

Hatch chose to return to the canvas as her substrate. Instead of working in the oil paint she had used as a student, she began to experiment with acrylic, and her subject matter changed as well. She now depicted the buildings and landscapes around her home. With the help of an opaque projector, Hatch gradually developed a new means of compositional design as well, creating collages with photographs which she translated to canvas through free-hand sketches. Unlike watercolor, she could use acrylic to paint over areas and to develop images through opaque layers. Skies could be blue one day and orange the next without the unpleasant appearance that could happen with overpainting in watercolor, where transparency was the desired effect and intrinsic to the medium.

Beginning with a series of images of the neighborhood surrounding her home, Hatch produced straightforward acrylic paintings with vibrant colors. Views of the corner several blocks from her home and nearby Trolley Square are an homage to American painter Edward Hopper. Hatch refamiliarized herself with the paint, learning its properties, application, and color mixing.

Acrylic paints also can have a very flat appearance without the richness of oil. Artists therefore utilize different mediums to achieve visual depth. They also can apply the paint with a lot of water, resulting in transparent layers. However, Hatch was not interested in recreating watercolors but in exploring new possibilities. One technique that she developed was to employ an underpainting using intense hues such as cadmium orange or Phthalo blue to instill a sense of depth in the painting.

Within a few years of shifting to acrylic painting on canvas, Hatch had conquered the medium and found new subject matter. She continued to explore her immediate neighborhood, but looked for ways to emphasize abstract forms and complex patterns. For example, these ranged from accentuating angles in a view of a sycamore tree in front of a heavily corniced building in one work or in emphasizing the pattern of a metal lace garden bench in another.

Landscape gradually became Hatch’s dominant subject, but the compositions depended upon abstract patterns. These could be the complex organizations of tree branches, streetlamps lined up along a road, arched tree trunks whose forms are echoed in distant bridges, or rocks piled at a shoreline with the striations of a colorful and dramatic sunset above them. The topiaries at nearby Longwood Gardens captured her imagination. The geometrically shaped bushes and the planting patterns fit well with Hatch’s compositional structuring. Light became a focus. Utilizing the potential of intense color to describe various types of light, from sunlight to artificial illumination, Hatch’s organization of colored light emphasizes the underlying abstraction of her compositions.

She did not have to go far to find inspiration. Hatch can see Kentmere Parkway out her window and walk up the street to Rockford Park. Within a ten-minute stroll is the Brandywine River, a part of the city of Wilmington with scenic beauty, established trees, and stately homes. While she lives in the city, there are also state parks nearby. The shift from the domestic content of the watercolors to the landscape paintings on canvas did not take her far from home. And like the increasing scale of her earlier watercolors, Hatch’s paintings in the new medium became larger as well.

A series of works with close-up views of plants has occupied Hatch in recent years. It is as if the artist has focused on a section of a landscape. She collages and frames parts of photographs to work out compositions, but once sketching on canvas, decisions can take the artist far from the original source. Artists have employed photography since the invention of the camera, even before there was the ability to permanently fix an image.1 One aspect of Hatch’s use of the photographic sketch is that it can emphasize dramatic contrasts between light and dark, which informs this group. A related body of work exhibited in 2019 is a series painted on commercially printed cotton fabric. The tonal range of paint on an unprimed textile is closer in character to the earlier watercolor paintings. However, these works share many elements with the similar subjects on canvas. Hatch is constantly experimenting, and she likes to be challenged.

Family While never pursuing portrait painting more broadly, Hatch has depicted members of her family. These images tell the story of the passage of time. They quietly demonstrate the constants in her life, the support of her husband Denison, and the desire to combine family and career. For many women in the not-too-distant past, being an artist meant not marrying or having children. Hatch’s professional life coincided with the height of the Women’s Movement. Through creating a practice that depends upon subjects close to her, Hatch has established a compelling body of work that brings together life and art.

NOTES

1 The camera obscura was employed by European artists from the mid-16th century onward.