Mary Hatch

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Review/Article

Review/Article:

THE ANN ARBOR NEWS, (REVIEW) SEPTEMBER 20, 1987

Dreamlike Tension Hides the Intention that Resides in Subdued Narration, at Claire Spitler Gallery, by John Carlos Cantu

There is a remarkable psychological tension sublimated in the paintings of Mary Hatch. A Kalamazoo resident and 1986 recipient of a Creative Artist Grant from the Michigan Council for the Arts, "Dancers and Dreamers," currently on display at the Claire Spitler Gallery, manifests itself in a subdued narrative, revealing itself through the key repetition of a chosen motif. This psychological edge is all the more extraordinary considering the severe representation.

Hatch combines this expressionism with a measured and subtle dose of surrealism while surrendering herself to neither school. Her work, though somewhat mannered, portrays human figures captured in arrested motion-her signature execution.

Hatch's art is both an extension and exploration of well-covered ground in contemporary art. By incorporating and moving beyond this territory, however, her work resides in the penumbra of the psychological shadows she illustrates. It is well between the image and idea underlying her art that the strength of her work reveals itself.

"The Failed Matador," depicts two women facing one another in what seems to reflect a narrative, but the context of the painting is sufficiently ambiguous as to throw this narrative into question.

The woman to the right holds her right hand outward and holds a white handkerchief in her left, thereby mimicking the action of a toreador. The opposite figure has a bramble wrapped around her forehead as she mimics the passing of a bull. Nevertheless, the figures seem oddly detached-neither is directly looking upon another-they seem to stand isolated together in their picture plane.

"Scattered," on the other hand, extends this isolation further while incorporating a series of motifs, which figure prominently in many of the works in this exhibit. Two women wearing white dresses, their faces, necks, and higher torso outside of the picture plane, stand in isolated arrested motion. One figure faces left and holds a yo-yo from her right hand, while the left hand figure stands behind a chair which she props forward. On the foreground various scattered toys: a green airplane, a nondescript house, and two mannequins.

Once again, the narrative is sufficiently ambiguous as to close the viewer from the context of the painting. However, beyond the isolation of the women in the work, there is also the added dismemberment of one of the mannequins. Hatch's homage to Giorgio de Chirico has thus been intermingled with a touch of Hieronymus Bosch. And when this almost subliminal influence of the fantastic is incorporated into the painting's motif, "Scattered" becomes all the more ambiguous in its shadows and motivations.

If the flourishes of Bosch and de Chirico seem to inhabit Hatch's "Scattered," "Phantoms" seems to owe a debt to no one but Hatch alone. A relatively simple work of enormous impact-a young woman wearing a white summer dress sits in a chair facing the viewer. To the forefront of the painting, ethereal flamingos walk before her.

Whatever the intended psychological meaning of this work, it is isolated in the canvas. The contrast between the fully painted woman and the birds with the grey shadows of the room's bare walls is strong enough in its own right to create an emotional juxtaposition which seems to be finely balanced between the imagery and the idea of the painting. Once again, Hatch's iconography is sufficiently dense to prohibit a total reading.

The work of Mary Hatch does not reveal itself readily to superficial investigation, but for the interested viewer willing to invest a little time to the study of her iconography as it moves from painting to painting her paintings are fascinating studies, which seem to reveal themselves pictorially even as they hide their intentions psychologically. And that is what dreams are about.

WEST MICHIGAN MAGAZINE, JULY 1987

Coming of Age in Kalamazoo, by Kathryn Zerler

When Mary Hatch began painting at 14, she never dreamed that becoming a successful artist would require more than skillful use of brushes and palette. But by the time she graduated with a degree in art from Western Michigan University, she knew that getting a foothold inside the arts community was a necessity.

"I started going to the library at the Art Center because it was easier to find materials there than at Western," says Hatch. "I met (Kalamazoo sculptor) Kirk Newman, who was director of education at the time, and when I showed him slides of my work, he gave me a teaching job."

Hatch found in her job at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (KIA) valuable contact with other artists. "Three years in a row Kirk Newman got an artist named Harvey Breverman to Kalamazoo for a two-week workshop. It was wonderful, because Harvey's work was quite similar to the way I work. At the time, abstract art was all the rage and I felt sort of isolated working with figures like I do. Not only was Harvey an excellent teacher, but he is also an excellent artist, and finding people who are good at the work you want to do and learning from them is invaluable incentive for an artist."

After Hatch's paintings were shown in 1978 at a Western art fair featuring alumni works, she was invited to give a show at a corporate gallery at Kingscott Associates, Inc., a Kalamazoo architectural firm. One contact led to another, and today Hatch's work is shown at galleries in Chicago and New York.

She says she owes much of her success to "the tremendous support that Kalamazoo community gives to the arts. Until you start showing you never know how people are going to react to your work. The people here were very supportive; some of them even encouraged me to move to New York. But Kalamazoo is where I started, and it's still the place where I feel I can paint."

Some artist wait years for their first big break, but curator Helen Sheridan says the philosophy of the KIA is to give young artists showings so they can get feedback early in their careers. "Having an exhibit gives an artist confidence, so we offer opportunities for artists of varying levels to show their work," says Sheridan. "An exhibition takes a great deal of courage; it's like exhibiting yourself."

Sheridan credits a sophisticated audience of arts patrons attracted to the area by the colleges, and plenty o corporate support for creating a successful arts community. "We give artists jobs, we show their work, we put on classes and seminars, we bring in the works of accomplished artists for them to study," Sheridan says. "This is a good place to come of age as an artist."

She notes that many artists like Hatch, who have strong local base in Kalamazoo, also work professionally in other cities. Some of these are painter Ken Freed, printmaker Denise Lisiecke, sculptors Newman and Marcia Wood, and photographers Peggy Michael and Jim Riegel.

According to Sheridan, Kalamazoo has a national reputation as a strong supporter of artists.

PASSAGES NORTH, WINTER, 1987

To Get Hold of the Invisible, by Ben Mitchell

I saw my first Mary Hatch painting nearly ten years ago. Then, as now, I was forcefully drawn to her work, intrigued by it, mystified, frustrated at times, and always delighted by what was there on the canvas - the drama, the eccentric postures and behavior of the figures, the array of seemingly unexplainable events and objects, the at-times tenuous imbalance in the finely-balanced compositions. But more important, I continue to be moved by the resonant possibilities of what is not there, what is not obvious or explained for us as viewers. Frustrating, yes, delightfully frustrating. Some art may only be described as personal and private, even if it also appeals deeply to others. Mary Hatch's paintings are intensely, demandingly private.

Mary Hatch is painting what speaks to her in a deep, personal fashion, and for many of us who are moved by her paintings, something deeply personal is touched within us. She knows this: "The artist is bringing up what is in the unconscious; that's why it connects with people, even though this cannot be intellectualized. It's pervasive….Maybe that's why the artist doesn't always understand the work, but can communicate." These paintings are visual representations of her private fantasy world in which characters, obscure and often surprising objects, passionate colors (tragically, something the readers of this issue miss in the reproductions), and dramatic moments are given form, setting. And this must be private, it's coming from the unconscious. "What's private in me is private in everyone else," she says. "There are universals." The paintings are allusive, simultaneously personal and universal, representing possibility itself rather than a rigidly defined intellectual invention or interpretation.

But there is something even more forceful than this individual, emotional response that moves me, that brings me back to face Mary's canvases again and again: her paintings are narratives, and there is an imaginative, compelling story evolving in these paintings. As viewers, we are invited into the unraveling of a story in medias res- we aren't there at the beginning, but are welcome to help search for the thread and follow that thread wherever it might lead. The richness of that potential, the places we may find ourselves as viewers, is the unusual power in Mary Hatch's art.

Mary is aware of how both the story and the figurative painting share similar architectural and technical elements: "Only upon reflection do I see stories. My work develops the way a writer develops a novel-character takes over, and at a certain point a personality develops. I set up a little drama... a story....It's essential that the characters are doing what they're doing. A figure will trigger a relationship with another figure. I'll begin to know where they belong, in which environment." Because of this dramatic quality, there is a pervasive and enigmatic sense of the invisible, the unfinished-though not in any sense of the craft, for she is highly skilled and subtle painter. It's an invisibility that stimulates our imagination, that draws us to attempt to unravel the "meanings" of the paintings while becoming more and more caught up in the evocative possibilities, and the impossibility of ever really knowing. Viewers are sometimes angry with this. They demand answers, a neatly-packaged moral or explanation. Mary says, "Why can you relate to a poem in a very deep way without understanding? Because you trust your emotions. In a sense, there is confrontation in my paintings, an awareness that there is a viewer, a public, another world. There are people who don't like it (the work) because they don't understand it right away, but I don't either-I don't want to, if I did I'd be bored."

The paintings are assemblages of character, setting, gesture, object and color, a frozen moment on a stage, a momentarily arrested dance. As Mary wrote earlier this year for the Chicago dance journal SALOME: "Dancers and figurative artists, I believe, share certain sensibilities. They both have heightened awareness of the body and its ability to communicate endless levels of meaning through the slightest gesture or movement." Like a dance or play, her paintings provoke and evoke rather than define and describe the world for us. The narrative in front of us, the sensation of time folding on itself and simultaneously unfolding outward, the mysteriousness of the settings and objects which inhabit the setting-these create an echo of the unconscious, of truth. She says it better: "Somehow you can read the truth, see the truth. In anything. The images or the story connects to something that is true in yourself, as opposed to merely entertaining. I love it, this connecting that happens between the artist and the viewer, I love it because it speaks to me. You can't close the door."

If we accept the work on its own terms and respond to the invitation in the paintings' narrative, to the enigmatic and tentative qualities, we can recognize parts of ourselves in the drama. In what is visible to us as viewers, we are drawn to the invisible, something we can perhaps attempt to hold, however fleetingly: that "mysterious, unseen reality" that is inside all of us, privately and universally