Björk, Baudelaire, Blake: Poetic Echoes in Scott Ketcham's Recent Work

"Chrysalis"*

So already, the painting you're looking at is called "Chrysalis," and it's fascinated me since I first saw it some weeks back. It embodies the monstrous humanness, primal urgency, and lulling darkness that often co-exist in Scott Ketcham's work--and that  frequently resist my efforts to reconcile them.

I share it with you here because Scott Ketcham's open studios are this weekend--November 17 and 18--in Rockland, MA.* The work that Scott will be showing this year represents a wider range of categories--portraits, abstract figurative works, landscapes, and still lifes--than it has in recent years. But all of it thrives on seductive ambiguity and unsettling tensions. That's why it reminds me of the poetry of Björk, Baudelaire, and Blake.

So what is it about "Chrysalis" that draws me in? First there's the imbalance of it: so much energetic intensity on its left-hand side, so much blank greenish-gold on its right-hand side. Then there's the chrysalis***, forceful, animate, and free-floating, as dominant an element of the picture as the figure emerging from it. Finally there's the androgynous figure, its closed eyes telegraphing different possible messages about the experience of emergence: are the eyes closed in concentration as the figure fights to emerge, or in effortless sleep as the chrysalis labors to expel it? Maybe it's neither of these.

Echoes of Björk
Emergence has been a longtime theme of Scott's work. But the other day as I contemplated the ideas of emergence and urgency, the two words fused to become "emurgency," bringing to mind the refrain from Björk's "State of Emergency" (sung here by Renee Fleming):

  Emotional landscapes
  They puzzle me
  The riddle gets solved
  And you push me up to 

  This state of emergency
  How beautiful to be!
  State of emergency 
  is where I want to be.****

"Spinning Dreidel"

Those words seem to fit equally well with "Spinning Dreidel,*****" which also combines athletic tension and inscrutable bliss; "how beautiful" to unfurl and twirl while free-falling through nothingness--perhaps. 

As onlookers, we're repelled, envious, or both, uncertain whether the figure feels powerless, free, or simply too peacefully ecstatic to care. Since her black hair hangs down rather than flies straight out, it's possible we're seeing languid stretching rather than taut, rapid spinning. In that case, she's more like a pole dancer without a pole than a spinning top. Hmmm . . .

Echoes of Baudelaire
For both Scott and Baudelaire, beautiful, languorous women--the "Spinning Dreidel" woman might be such a woman--are a favorite artistic subject. And for both of them, opulent hair often contributes to the women's thrilling power.

"Friendly Grasp"

"Indescribable Feeling"

Whether the figure seems to evince little or no consciousness of the seductive power of her mane--as in "Friendly Grasp"--or is enraptured by her own hair, as in "Indescribable Feeling," the poet and the painter are intensely aware of it. 

"Life Study"

Scott's "Life Study," in which the figure could be sleeping innocently or feigning sleep in order to maximize her seductive power, seems to pair perfectly with the final two stanzas of Baudelaire's "La Chevelure" ("Hair")****: 

    Blue-black hair, pavilion hung with 
         shadows,
    You give back to me the blue of the vast 
        round sky;
    In the downy edges of your curling 
        tresses
    I ardently get drunk with the mingled 
        odors
    Of oil of coconut, of musk and tar.

    A long time! Forever! my hand in your 
        thick mane
    Will scatter sapphires, rubies and pearls,
    So that you will never be deaf to my desire!
    Aren't you the oasis of which I dream, the gourd
    From which I drink deeply, the wine of memory?*******

Given Baudelaire's many poems about mysterious, voluptuous women, I imagined that I would be stoking Scott's figure-painting fire when I gave him Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) last Christmas. So I was surprised when the book inspired him to paint a series of floral still lifes.

Les Fleurs du Mal (#2)

Les Fleurs du Mal (#4)

Like the two seen here, all of them are beautiful but also somewhat sinister, or even lugubrious, more suggestive of cosmic disorder than a tended garden beyond the back door.

Echoes of Blake
This suggestion of decay in Scott's flowers, emphasized by the feverish palette Scott chose for them, is what led me to think of Scott's work in connection with William Blake's illustrated Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. "O Rose thou art sick" begins "The Sick Rose" from the Experience section of Blake's collection..******* 

"Nothing gold can stay" in Robert Frost's world, and nothing innocent can stay in Blake's. In Blake's engraving of the poem, the sick, bulbous rose slumps, succumbing to the worm's "dark, secret love" before an intensifying background blue; "crimson joy" fades to graying maroon. The thorny stems bend to form a pricking arch--or is it a crown of thorns? What's darker than love that destroys the beloved? Here's a state of emergency that lifts up and carries no one. And still, its depiction is beautiful.

There's another Scott-Blake similarity: the works of Scott and Blake often provide views of the same subject from different perspectives. Blake offers a poem called "The Chimney Sweeper" in each of the two sections of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience; Scott offers the same cherished place during two different "phases" in two recent plein air landscapes:

"Brook, Dark Phase"

"Brook, Light Phase"

I love both of these paintings of the brook that runs close to our cabin just west of the Berkshires. But I was startled at first by Scott's titles for the two works. I knew that "Brook, Dark Phase" had been painted on a sunny mid-afternoon and that "Brook, Light Phase" had been painted on a cloudy late-afternoon; hence, I immediately associated the former with light, and the latter with darkness. Scott's titles, however, made me look again. This time, I appreciated how much darkness there was "Brook, Dark Phase," even though the grotto-like space also sparkled with brilliant sunlight. And I recognized how much light bounced on water and rock despite the day's hidden sun in "Brook, Light Phase,"

In Scott's work--and also in the works of Björk and Baudelaire--light and dark are inseparable companions rather than sworn adversaries as they sometimes are in Blake's poems. They meet in the shadows, overlap, even change places.

Untitled New Painting in Scott's Studio

As a younger person, I glanced quickly at beauty that intimidated me, then moved on from it. Now, I look at it directly and keep looking. Every year, there are beautiful Scott paintings that disturb me. But I hang in there, and as my relationship with them changes, so too does my relationship with the world and myself. I love that art--especially Scott's art--gives me that opportunity.

If the paintings you've seen here intrigue or delight you, please come see many more of them this weekend at Scott Ketcham's open studios**!

* All of Scott's paintings can be found at scottketcham.com.
** Scott's studio is on the fourth floor of The Sandpaper Factory at 83 East Water Street; open studios are from 12:00 to 5:00 on both Saturday, November 17, and Sunday, November 18.

*** Screen shot of a photo of chrysalis found in the following blog: Elliott, Barb. “Raising Monarchs.” Backyards of Nature, Valley Forge Audubon Society, 20 Aug. 2012, backyardsfornature.org/?tag=chrysalis.
**** Text copied from CD album jacket of Renée Fleming: Distant Light, Decca B0026096-02, released in the USA on 13 Jan 2017.
***** A dreidel is a 4-sided top; a traditional game is played with the dreidel during the Jewish holiday of Chanukah.
*(6) Translation by William Aggeler inThe Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954):  https://fleursdumal.org/poem/203
*(7) I think Blake would have loved these lines from Björk's "Virus": "Like a virus needs a body/ As soft tissue feeds on blood/ Some day I'll find you, the urge is here"