Art I like - Ana Hatherly

Part of my research for the writing/drawing essay is the work of Portuguese poet, novelist, essayist and visual artist Ana Hatherly. Her training is in music, cinematography and literature, and she's been publishing poety since 1958. Her work is based on continuous movement between the drawn and the written, which results sometimes in abstract calligraphic works and sometimes in visual poetry. She began her research into the field of concrete poetry in 1959, beginning to work with experimental poetry in 1965. The 1969 exhibition Anagramas (Anagrams) marks the start of her incursion into the domain of the visual arts. She calls herself "an artist of the written line." The Gulbenkian Foundation has 157 of her graphic works in its collection, both monochrome and technicolour, most with "writing" of some sort.

Untitled, undated; exhibited at the Drawing Centre, New York, in 1994 

More photos at http://librodeartista.ning.com/photo/una-conversacion-con-ana-18/next?context=user, including pages from one of her visual books.

It's not proving easy to find much written in English about her. http://thecribsheet-isabelinho.blogspot.com/search/label/Ana%20Hatherly has a discussion of "O Escritor", including this image, a combination of typography (code with no meaning) and handwriting (meaning in a personal code) -

Informative words about her role in Portuguese concrete poetry movement come from "The hand's own intelligence" by artist and art historian Ruth Rosengarten:

"Hatherly published her first book of poetry, Um Ritmo Perdido (A Lost Rhythm) in 1958. She began exploring the potential of poetry in the 1960s, joining the Group of Experimental Poetry, whose members were among the first to write concrete poetry in Portugal. Concrete poetry depends on the notion that a poem is, above all, ‘a constellation of signs on a white page.’ The reading of the poem is always underpinned by its visual representation, so that the poem is, in the first place, a kind of drawing. It was in this context that Hatherly began her arduous research into writing. Examining Baroque poetry and Alexandrine verse during her long and distinguished academic career, she has found in western culture an ancient tradition linking writing as an activity that produces meaning with writing as pictorial mark. During the 20th century, this tradition was again explored by Dada and surrealist poets, and later, in concrete poetry. Soon, Hatherly began to look further afield, away from western culture. In the 1960s, a friend gave her a dictionary of Chinese characters, both new and archaic. ‘I began to copy these drawings – to me they were just drawings, because I couldn’t read Chinese, and anyhow, their meaning wasn’t what interested me,’ she observes.

"The genesis of Hatherly’s pictorial art lies in forgetting what she knows and reinventing writing anew each time. ‘How do I do that? By making writing illegible. I always say that what is needed is to see the writing, and not what is written.’ She began copying the manual of Chinese characters: ‘I copied and copied, until my hand itself become comprehending, intelligent.’ It is, then, on the basis of the hand’s own intelligence that Ana Hatherly constructs her drawn and painted images. Her idiom is profoundly indebted to calligraphy, and if it appears to be governed by a certain unconscious drive, she never abandons a transfiguring clarity."

I wonder if works like this untitled one from 1971 (in the Gulbenkian collection) are based on the Chinese characters -

From her 2005 book "Fibrilacoes", here's a "fibrillation" of interlocked/interknit lines -

Seen only online, it's impossible to read, but the point is that this is visual poetry and thereby conveys its meaning - especially to non-Portuguese speakers - in that way. I feel the words would give a further clue to the shapes used ... which at the moment (influenced by the medical connotation of "fibrillation" - fast and erratic heartbeat) look to me like red blood cells clotting.

To end this post, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Invaded by Time", 1991 -