So already, whenever I encounter Scott Ketcham's most recent works, I almost always respond in strong, often contradictory ways. I love, I admire, I long to look longer, I long to look away, I wonder what it means that I'm married to the man who painted them. This year, among Scott's varied new works is one painting I immediately fell in love with, even though it has so much in common with some other paintings that creep me out.
To my eye and imagination, "Winged Sod" presents a voluptuous figure who's in strenuous flight, her head bowed, her wings--or is it wing?--extended back, her meaty, muscular legs--the thighs of a committed athlete--contracted in energized suspension above a field of crinkled white nothingness. Bowed and triumphant both. First impressions.
Of whom or what did she remind me--besides a number of professional basketball players whom sports photographers often capture in mid-air beneath the hoop, their arched and twisted bodies conveying their committed intensity and staggering athleticism?
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| "Winged Victory"** |
I took my first cue from the first word of her title--and did an online search for "Winged Victory."* Blogger saltgirlspeaks, like myself, was curious about the goddess Nike's missing arms and head; her reflection that "there’s a certain melancholy beauty to destroyed victory…"** got me thinking about the themes and overall mood of Scott's work: even in Scott's strongest, most nearly triumphant athletic figures, male and female, there's a feeling of tireless, unbowed resignation to perpetual struggle. I'm guessing that when Nike still had her head and arms, she exuded the joy of safe landing following a mission accomplished. Scott's "Winged Sod," in contrast, is still in motion, still striving, still flying--more in a state of ongoing intention than fulfilled achievement.
Missing body parts, athletic figures stretched more horizontal than vertical captured in action. Suddenly it was Rodin's "Iris, Messenger of the Gods" that "Winged Sod" had me thinking about. I had to laugh remembering the field trip one of my classes took to Harvard's Fogg Art Museum on which our enthusiastic elderly-woman docent had asked my students, much to their teenage chagrin****, to look long and carefully at Rodin's anatomically graphic statue in preparation for comparing and contrasting it with a Degas ballerina that stood nearby.
More importantly, my association to Rodin's sculptures reminded me of two things that sometimes disturb me about Scott's paintings: that the figures often lack parts of their bodies; and that, when their faces can be seen, their eyes are often blank or closed, suggesting torpor, death, profound disconnection from the viewer or anyone else, for that matter. Iris is a mythological figure; how individual and grounded in the "real world" are Scott's figures, or do they represent universal aspects of human experience--at least as Scott understands them?
Clearly, it was time to talk to Scott about all of this. As far as "Winged Victory" was concerned, Scott told me that antiquities not even that long ago were often vandalized by collectors who were happy to lop off and carry home a part of them if having and transporting the whole was not possible: why not break off the head of the goddess Nike and smuggle it home in a steamer trunk?
In explaining Rodin's many "incomplete" statues, Scott, who admits to Rodin's influence on his work and consciousness, explained that Rodin's work was metonymic, and then said that though the statue did not depict the whole body, it stood for and evoked the whole body. The more he explained, the more I understood that he was talking about that subcategory of metonymy known as synecdoche: the whole is suggested or implied by the parts or the partial, in this case, by the partial body.
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| Kensington Lawns Sod |
It's always good to be reassured that your husband has no interest in beheading, abbreviating, or dismembering people, especially women. And that wasn't a problem with "Winged Sod" anyway: she has a head. Her thick hair obscures the face--so we can't tell if her eyes are closed. But wait: is that hair, and can one be sure she has a head? "Or is what I'm interpreting as being hair actually sod, "a section cut or torn from the surface of grassland, containing the matted roots of grass," that's taking the place of a human head? Of course, it is possible that's Scott's title is simply conveying an association that Scott is making. Whatever is the case, I'm willing to replace the goddess Nike in my
imagination with the Greek goddess Gaia, who's often understood as Earth
itself, the source of all.
The problem is that, despite my comforting mythological associations, Scott has several other paintings that place women in relationship to sod and other earth surfaces that really trouble me. Chief among them is "Head in the Sand (2)": frankly, it terrifies and therefore repels me: the body seems butchered or at least completely vulnerable; from my perspective, the form can't breathe, let alone see. That said, I wonder what I would see if I didn't know this painting's title: a darker object at the bottom of the painting with a strong, dark upper edge, and a very geometric something above it that's cinched in the middle? This painting could easily be looked at abstractly. That thought made me understand Scott's general preference not to give names to his paintings.
Not horrifying but still troubling to me is "Edged Sod." Its crouched figure may be the most Gaia-esque of Scott's sod-connected females: she hosts the living world, carries it on her back. But is she a willing and eager hostess? Observing her taut, compact, energy-demanding position, I surmise that she might be oppressed by the sod she carries, especially given the painting's title's suggestion that she's merely the edge of the dominant sod, thus more its servant than its source.
In fact, there seem to be three distinct relationships between the figures and "the sod" in Scott's paintings:
- In one group, figures actually merge with the sod/earth, as is the case in "Edged Sod";
- In another group, the figures move in, out, and through the sod--but remain separate, intact, and fully human, as is the case in "Persephone Prepared" (I blogged about Persephone connections in Scott's paintings a few years back); and
- In yet another group, as in the case of "Uprooted," the figures are attenuated or otherwise "restructured" so that they have roots--or are roots, suggesting they've been plucked from the sod.
Whether that separation from the sod represents liberation or forced exile from the life source, I can't tell. Whenever I'm baffled by motifs and patterns that I observe in Scott's work, I invariably pay attention to the literary associations I make to them. In this case, it's T.S. Eliot's lines from "The Wasteland" that keep coming to me: "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of the stony rubbish?" But I suspect I'm quoting Eliot to myself only because he's articulating my own question. I'm hard-pressed to equate sod with stony rubbish. Dark as Scott's work is, there's a fertility to it: the darkness he portrays births things.
Recently, Scott messaged me a drawing that moved me--it was simultaneously sweet and strange. In this drawing, the two figures of indeterminate gender are joined, connected, intimate, encircling, and they seem to share common roots--unless perhaps they are sharing kind of charged connection emanating from something not on the paper.
Yes, there's so much that's mystifying in Scott's paintings for sure, but I would feel remiss if I did not mention that's Scott's artistic output this year also includes portraits and life studies very much concerned with conveying the appearance and essence of the individual person posing for him. My purpose here, however, has been to talk about some of his work that's most challenged me as a viewer.
So I end this post with two invitations for you to come see Scott's work large and up close:
- If you wish to see Scott's most recent work, please come to his studio during the 4th Floor Artists Association's annual open studios on Saturday, November 23 and/or Sunday, November 24. Scott's studio is on the Fourth Floor of the Sandpaper Factory.
- If you wish to see more of a retrospective of Scott's work,
please come to his show in the ET Wright Building that will run from
Friday, January 10 through Friday, January 17; the opening is on Friday,
January 10.
Hoping to see you in Rockland!
* On Scott Ketcham's website: https://www.scottketcham.com
** Saltgirlspeaks. “Invisible Ink.” The Salt Girl Speaks, WordPress, 16 July 2007, saltgirlspeaks. wordpress.com/2007/07/16/invisible-ink/.
*** Rodin. (1880-1881). Iris, Messenger of the Gods. [Scuplture, bronze]. Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA. Harvard Art Museums (web site).
**** When, after the observation period, our docent used the word "labia" and then pointed at the statue's female private parts, most of my
students stared at the floor.
