"Down Where It's Tangled and Dark": Scott Ketcham's Latest Work

So already, on her Luck of the Draw album, Bonnie Raitt performs an original song about terror, truth, hope and love entitled "Tangled and Dark."* In its opening stanzas, the speaker demands her potential lover to know and see himself fully:  without his self-knowledge and at least some disclosure of it, they won't be able to have intimate, enduring, and therefore deeply satisfying love.

       Gonna get into it
       Down where it's tangled and dark
       Way on into it, Baby
       Down where your fears are parked.
       Gonna tell the truth about it,
       Honey that's the hardest part. . . .

       Gonna get into it, Baby
       Gonna give them demons a call
       Way on into it Baby
       Gonna find out once and for all
       Gonna get a little risky, Baby
       Honey that's my favorite part . . .

Raitt's song is on my mind because ever since I've known Scott (my husband), he's been painting his way toward something -- something elusive, important, and big.  Something inside of him and outside of him. He's been fully committed to it, doing it with love and hope -- and therefore often with despair and hopelessness.  But he's kept going. 

Meanwhile, he's always trusted in the shadows, always gravitated toward the murky, dark and opaque. While others have pursued shining mountain summits, he's often generally lagged behind to explore the turbid, teeming waters of some nearby bog or swamp.  

When he began pursuing his Master's of Fine Arts degree, however, his propensity for seeking out the "tangled and dark" intensified. The Johnson State College low-residency MFA program aided and abetted him.  For three summers, Scott spent eight weeks in residence at the Vermont Studio Center.  There he experienced the evolving art of others**, regularly shared his work with VFC visiting artists and JSC faculty members for their critique, immersed himself in making art without needing to spend time making meals, relished the fellowship of an artist community profoundly grateful to be creating art day and night, and often sat by the Lamoille River before or after dinner.  So much stimulation, interest, nature, and support -- and so much opportunity to enact his own and others' ideas about what he might try next to further explore and express the "tangled and dark."

Scott has done figure work almost exclusively this year; and just last spring, he wrote a paper entitled "The Liminal Body" in which he examined in particular the work of Kiki Smith, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, and Jenny Saville. In the introduction, he explained, "The body is essentially this inside which is primordially distinct from the outside mediated by a skin.  This casing, this shell, this membrane . . . is the margin, the threshold, the limen. From the magic moment we eject beyond the maternal limen, it packages this unity, enables connectivity, denies that periphery, keeps nihilistic forces of emptiness and formlessness at bay until that hour, that other magic moment when it surrenders us to the terrestrial limen."

The work that Scott showed at last year's open studio reflected his evolving sense of the body as threshold. Entitled "Merging and Emerging," last year's collection of work strongly suggested any number of connections.  I remember trying to make sense of one painting:  was the figure being born? being born from itself? giving birth to itself?  to someone else, infant or adult? Wordsworth's "The Child is the father of the Man" line kept coming into my mind.

This year's collection of work, has even gone deeper down, to where it's really "tangled and dark." I realize that as it grows in intensity, it asks for a different, more immediate response from the viewer. So last week when I went down to Scott's studio to see the body of work-in-progress, I felt put on the spot. It wasn't easy:  I had to experience that art because it outright demanded it of me as a human being right then and there.  Not that I couldn't think something later and different.  But I had to react "now" first.

Before I go any further, let me make clear that I think Scott's paintings are REALLY GREAT.  I know I'm his wife.  I know I'm biased.  But I know I'm right. They are compellingly beautiful and always haunting. Beautiful when they lure you into some world of voluptuous promise; beautiful when they unsettle and disturb you with their suggestion that death is always -- furtively, and perhaps even sinisterly -- enmeshed with vibrant life .  Beautiful when you stand fifteen feet away from them taking in the overall effect of the ambiguous entirety of each, and beautiful when you stand right next to them and look closely at the paint -- its colors, directions, textures, layers, and thicknesses.

And they are also really great because they ask us to encounter our own universal humanness, especially as it both transcends and cannot escape time and place -- and even, perhaps, our own skins. What does it mean to us that each one of us -- and our individual self in particular -- "is begotten, born, and dies"? What are all those things that beget us? How -- and how often -- are we born?  And how, and how often, do we die?

My reference above to a line from William Butler Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" reminds me of a quintessential experience I have while looking at Scott's work:  invariably, I remember some line of poetry or some story that worked its way into the stuff of my mind and imagination very long ago, and that has lived there ever since as something profoundly true, even if I almost always feel that I could understand it more deeply than I do at present.

Yes, I taught "Greek Mythology" and "Bible as Literature" for years; yes, I studied modern and symbolist poetry in college. But my point is that the poems, texts, and stories I recall were always the attempts of a poetic and/or spiritual imagination to wrap its arms around and then "give back" significant human experience or insight. I believe many of these writers and storytellers were seeking personal rather than universal truth -- a representation of a real encounter between their deepest inner selves and some idea or experience.  But I also believe that in drilling so deeply into the personal, the situational, and even the abstract philosophical, they invariably reached into essential experience.  Once they crossed into the essential, their art gained the power to enlighten so many more of us:  to connect us to ourselves, one another, our world, and our human situation.

So let me give you three examples of how my own comparative literature/English teacher experience leads me to respond to three of Scott's paintings.  When I first saw the one to the right, my first connection was to the story of Narcissus:  the figure initially seemed to me to be gazing into what might be a watery, reflecting surface.  But only a few glances later, I realized that none the faces in whatever that medium is over which the figure appears to be crouching -- not kneeling or sitting, as Narcissus might have done -- are reflections.  Perhaps they are faces of the same figure, but they may not be. Are these "figures beneath" other aspects of the crouching figure? They appear peaceful and unlined.  Could they be the ancestors from whom this figure is emerging?  But is he even fully human? Whatever is the case, he seems stuck somehow, perhaps even being pulled -- or pulling himself. Is he entering into or emerging from?  Narcissus is banished from my thoughts, though I started with him.

My next associations are to T.S. Eliot and Charles Baudelaire.  Are those lurking figures like the readers whom Baudelaire addresses in "Au Lecteur" (To the Reader), which opens Les Fleurs du Mal:  "Reader, you know this fiend, refined and ripe,/ Reader, O hypocrite — my like! — my brother!"***  Shades also of that ambiguous companion whom J. Alfred Prufrock addresses in the first line of Eliot's poem:  "Let us go then, you and I, . . .."

Or how about this one?  I know that my reaction to it is much more accepting and peaceful today than it was a week ago when I first saw it in Scott's studio -- and was completely repelled by the woman's affectionate (or is it controlling?) embrace of this figure that seems both simian and skeletal to me. But since then, I have begun teaching Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," in which Whitman journeys to a new understanding of and relationship with death -- in the physically close company of personified death:

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,

And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me, 

And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions, 

I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not, . . .

Even before Whitman's poem reminded me of his speaker's being supported rather than hounded or tormented by death, I had already begun grappling with the relaxed contentment of the female figure's face. If death becomes transformed, or even transfigured in this work (but does it really?), maybe I could make peace with it.  After all, the Furies become the Eumenides at some point in Greek mythology.  When Scott came home that night, I handed him my copy of the Oresteia.  I was trying very hard to overcome my initial repulsion to this painting that I also thought was very beautiful.  It's been on my mind since I saw it. We've accepted each other.

And then there are the erotic paintings -- which are always beautiful -- and often puzzling. Frequently, you're sure there are two people, except for the times that you have a nagging feeling that maybe you're really looking at only one person, an aspect of whose self is engaged fully in a completely creative act with another aspect of that self. Or is that blurred aspect an expression of the realized union, physical and other, of the two people? Because I've often found it difficult to understand where one figure ends and the other begins in these paintings, I have vowed to reread in my retirement William Blake's Milton, and to read others of Blake's works in which divine female emanations need to be reunited with their sources if the world is to be restored to its full potential for enlightened generativity.  I fear that what I just wrote is a gross simplification or misrepresentation of Blake, but my point is that I find myself at a great distance from something I read in college that seems difficult and important, that has stayed in my mind along with my conviction that it matters since college, and that provides me with a way to enter into Scott's work, which I believe entices and matters in a similar way.

And that's the power of Scott's art:  it stays on your mind because it's so frequently beautiful, arresting, and simultaneously provocative of the dark, the deeply personal, and the universal -- and it signals to your gut before your brain can do anything to shape either your emotional or intellectual responses. I'm not saying that one can come to love all of his paintings; I can't.  But I can love lots of them right away, and come to love others of them over time.

So if you are intrigued and attracted by Scott's work, I hope you'll come to his open studios in Rockland, MA on November 23 and 24 -- and that you'll check out his new web site when it's up and running early next year.

And if you think you'd like to come but the "tangled and dark" is holding you back, remember what Eliot said via J. Alfred Prufrock:  "Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'/Let us go and make our visit." 

[I've changed the settings on my blog, so I hope those of you who want to post will be able to do so without difficulty.  When you go to post, you will find that you can scroll down on the "Comment as" menu to "Anonymous" and elect that option if you don't have an existing online identity that this blog-host site will recognize.  Your post will be ascribed to "Anonymous" unless you elect to sign your post in some way to identify yourself as the person commenting.]

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20310#sthash.YtKuzlEb.dpu

* I used to play it for my students when we began our study of Oedipus Rex because it captured Oedipus' understanding that he needed to know the truth or risk not knowing and being who he was.
** The Vermont Studio Center hosts writers as well as visual artists.
***  "Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,/ — Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!" — translated by Jacques LeClercq, Flowers of Evil (Mt Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1958).