Assent to Descent: Scott Ketcham's Latest Work

Man in Membrane

So already, Scott Ketcham's latest work continues to explore how the individual, yearning always to realize his/her sublime yet finite humanness, is both freed and bound, or both frees and binds him/herself. It entices, compels, and disturbs. When my first impulse is turn away from it, it draws me in deeper; when instinctively I dive into it, primal forces I encounter there often freeze me in place before I can retreat, and I have no choice but to wrestle with my own human vulnerability and unrealized potential. Always I am both rewarded and unnerved, more aware of the possible ways each of us "is begotten, born, and dies."*

Drooping Man

In Scott's earlier work on the same theme, figures often merge with and emerge from other figures, beings, forms. For several years when Scott was painting almost exclusively on denril,** these processes and relationships took place against neutral, even blank backdrops. "Drooping Man" is representative of this earlier phase of Scott's work: the female figure and the male figure, as much red-winged bird as human, merge at torso and shoulder respectively, soft light warming them and the beige emptiness around them.

"Drooping Man" also illustrates the painting process that Scott describes as "subtractive."  Scott applies thinned oil paint--thinned more than he would thin paint for use on wood or canvas--to the blank denril sheet, and then uses paper towels and window-washing squeegees to spread it thinner, move it around, remove much of it. Even in this undersized reproduction of "Drooping Man," there's evidence of that manual manipulation of paint in the beige field surrounding the merged figures. 
  

Rapture on the Lake

While Scott moves paint around in similar ways whether he's painting on wood or on canvas, the same translucence does not result. When Scott paints on birch panels, as he's done often this past summer, he often paints over old paintings so that when he rubs and scrapes, the color and light from an old painting manifest themselves in a developing new one. If many of his figures tend to float on translucent nothingness when Scott paints on denril, his on-wood figures are often situated in or against multi-hued, variegated backdrops. Some of these backdrops represent actual physical settings, especially when Scott works from photos taken in deliberately chosen places. "Rapture on the Lake," ecstatically sensual, took its cue from a particular image from a photo shoot Scott did at a quarry pond somewhere in southeastern Massachusetts. 

"Couple"

There's plenty of shimmering light in "Rapture on the Lake," but it's not the illuminated translucence that often surrounds the figures in his on-denril paintings. When the figures in any of Scott's paintings writhe, connect, separate, emerge, and join, they compel the viewer to encounter, or re-encounter, the timeless power of human physicality, and of human needs and capacities for connection, fulfillment, self-realization, and world-making. When they writhe, connect, separate, emerge, and join against translucent backdrops and float on a kind of illuminated nothingness, they further invite mythical and metaphorical interpretation. The lovers in "Couple" become every couple. Perhaps his body is the trunk of a tree out of which her red-haired bliss is emerging; perhaps she is Eve emerging from Adam's rib. And yet, while these figures invite interpretation and seem to exist beyond time and space, they never cease to be completely human and mortal.

Importantly mortal. Their mortality contributes to the power of these paintings. Our time is limited. The forces that can crush us or liberate us, that will ultimately claim us, we must reckon with--sometimes bow to, sometimes harness. It's not just our humanness that shapes our quest; it's our humanness in a greater scheme of things. That's why I'm excited by (if sometimes unnerved by) the most recent development in Scott's paintings: the presence and attention to background, literal or figurative. Background as a player; background as a character or force in the timeless, finite narrative we each enact.

Wild Interior, Descent

When Scott began painting on birch panels after a long stretch of painting almost exclusively on denril, background was back--and initially I was disturbed. Lone, naked female figures often existed or moved about in shadowy interiors. Maybe it was my multiple viewings of "The Silence of the Lambs" or episodes of "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" in which naked females were held captive by sexual predators in cold, subterranean cells, but all I could see and feel were vulnerability and danger. Then I looked closer: the figure was moving of her own volition, descending confidently, arms extended, hips swiveled. She wasn't feeling vulnerable. Or maybe she was, but she was descending anyway. What was going on here? Clearly the mythic didn't need formless translucence to catalyze it; setting simultaneously abstract and concrete could stimulate recollections of other determined, purposeful descents--perhaps even our own--into the unknown.

There's an inversion here, at least from my point of view, which is all that it is--my point of view. I've grown up with a certain "Western" mythology around ascent and descent that stubbornly abides on some level despite many years of acknowledging the psycho-spiritual benefits of going "down where it's tangled and dark."**** My gut instinct is still to view ascent as progress, positive and desirable, and to view descent as digression or detour, negative and undesirable, to be avoided, overcome, or dispensed with quickly. Never mind that the angels went up and down Jacob's ladder. 

Veiled Descent

Scott's paintings force a reconsideration of descent, even his denril ones. As Scott moved between painting on denril and painting on wood this past summer, background became a more regular element of his denril paintings as well--and so did the theme of descent and the question of when descent affirms life and when it strangles it. I struggle terribly with "Veiled Descent," painted on denril and seen to the left. The upward gaze of the figure, whose arms seem too abstract to be able to lift her out of the cold fissure into which she is descending more deeply, is both resigned and defiant. I can't get over the idea that she's been here before, done this before, a Sisyphos figure whose routine ascents and descents are a fact of her existence. I end up admiring her spirit and hating her powerlessness, even though so much about her body, her stance, and her attitude indicate power and force. I can barely look--and I can't not look--at this painting.

Cloak (September 2014)

I think of it as the "Persephone Problem," and I first mentioned it to Scott a while back when I noticed that many of his paintings depicted beautiful earthly women enmeshed with phantom or  seemlingly dead suitors or lovers. As I mentioned in the blog post I wrote last year right before Scott's open studios, this brought me back to Louise Glück's collection of poems entitled Averno,**** in which she explores what we know, can't know for sure, and don't want to know about the troubling deal between Demeter, Persephone's mother, and Hades, Persephone's mate. As the poem "Persephone the Wanderer" explains,

She is lying in the bed of Hades.
What is in her mind?
Is she afraid? Has something
blotted out the idea
of mind?

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

Grim stuff, especially given the new twist on the tale: there are two equally unsympathetic figures to blame for the "incarceration" of Persephone, and one of them is her own mother. Imagining Persephone's experience, Glück wonders,

. . . [I]s earth
“home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she
a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like
no one, you know. The characters
are not people.
They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict. (17)

Persephone's Struggle

It's possible that while we might seek an answer to these questions from Persephone, she couldn't give one. Perhaps she's tired of loving what she'd rather hate and hating what she'd rather love; perhaps she no longer cares since having an answer would have no effect on her unchosen obligation. Scott's painting "Persephone's Struggle"--Scott's painted Persephone a number of times in the past year--captures that ambiguity. Despite the painting's title, Persephone appears more somnolent and resigned than struggling. Furthermore, the realm above the membrane she's penetrating, above the boundary she's crossing, seems identical to the one below it--and identically vague in nature. Strangely little drama and difference as she passes from the world of the living to the world of the dead. Maybe we're all habituated to such anti-climactic metaphorical crossings. 

Bridge

Is death always so familiar and so near? And does it heighten and inform our experience of life, shape it more positively than we'd rather imagine? Is it most through our own bodies that we experience the pull of and connection between both states, both worlds? In two of Scott's paintings, "Bridge" and "Rare Water" (the latter is seen below and to the left), the human body becomes an isthmus that joins two bodies of land, and in so doing connects two realms that might otherwise be happily or unhappily separate. There's effort involved in maintaining this joining--and there's also reward, as "Rare Water" suggests. But this business of being fully human--and inescapably mortal--is not for the faint of heart!

Rare Water

There's some serious stuff going on Scott Ketcham's recent works. Some days I'm initially uplifted by the possibilities and tensions they explore; other days I'm weighed down by them. But always I'm intrigued. And inevitably, the more deeply I engage with them, the more I both experience the complex humanity of and feel for Scott's figures, all of them on a journey for which there are many maps and no maps at all. Whether you journey down to Rockland to Scott's open studios on November 21 and 22 (see a copy of the flyer with the address below), or simply choose to spend some time looking at his web site, I'd be curious to know what you think and feel as you look at Scott's latest work. So please plunge in! As J. Alfred Prufrock would say in T.S. Eliot's poem, "Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'/Let us go and make our visit."



* From "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats: <https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/sailing-byzantium>
** Denril is "a versatile multi-media polypropylene material that combines the best properties of both drafting film and paper. Translucent, double-sided matte surface accepts pencil, pen & ink, markers, etc.": <http://www.artistcraftsman.com/borden-riley-denril-multi-media-vellum.html>.
*** Bonnie Raitt's phrase from her song "Tangled and Dark" on Luck of the Draw, the album/CD that she put out in 1991.
**** Glück, Louise. Averno. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print.