Go Figure! Looking at Scott Ketcham's Recent Paintings

So already, Scott Ketcham's open studios are happening next weekend--the weekend before Thanksgiving--from 12:00 to 5:00 on both Saturday, November 20 and Sunday, November 21 in Rockland, MA--and like America, Scott's back. Actually, the whole 4th Floor Artists Association is back: Scott's and his fellow artists' open studios didn't happen last November because of COVID-19. Scott painted some landscapes this year, but it's his paintings of the human figure--more and less abstract treatments of it--that he's choosing to feature this November.

"Ballancing Act," one of my favorites of his recent figurative paintings, will be on view. It intrigues me without disturbing me, which I can't say about all of Scott's paintings. 

So why do I love it? First of all, the painting is beautifuI. I love the shape of the figure hurtling toward whatever that sphere is, as well as her intensity and exquisite athleticism; she's got this! Then there's the way the paint is applied to create the variegated sky she's traversing and to convey the color, sheen, and texture--the aliveness--of her skin.

Second of all, the painting's colors and the figure's seemingly mid-air position remind me of the works of Marc Chagall--"The Blue Circus"* among them--that feature flying figures and canvas-dominating blues, some greener or more lavender than others, some more or less transparent than others. [Note: Scott includes animals in his paintings less often than does Chagall, but I tend to like Scott's  animals more than I like Chagall's.]

Third of all, the painting intrigues me. It may be that I should be using the word "ball" rather than sphere to describe the round object practically beneath the figure's feet, given that the painting is called "Ballancing Act"--"ballancing," not "balancing." But literally speaking, the figure isn't balancing on the ball--her feet aren't even on it, just as Chagall's trapeze artist isn't actually on the trapeze. [Note: Scott just read the Preview version of this post and confessed that "ballancing" is merely a spelling error on his part--but he will accept any praise for his creative misuse of the English language.]

So what is being balanced here? And who is doing the balancing? Given that it's 2021, I can't think of balancing without immediately thinking of the degrees to which the pandemic continually requires us to balance our needs to be apart from people and to be together with them. But mostly I find myself wondering what Scott is balancing as the artist--even though I don't think Scott would ever wonder that himself.

When I asked Scott if the model had posed with something spherical, he couldn't remember off the top of his head. 

Later though, he consulted the source photo: she'd posed in a semi-reclining posture with a red exercise ball during part of their photo session, and Scott had taken the liberty of rotating one of the photographs. If he hadn't rotated it, the painting might have looked more like this adjacent landscape-orientation version of it. So Scott's decision transformed her from a semi-recumbent woman using her feet to get her Pilates ball into position into a demi-goddess or superhero warrior racing towards Earth.

Really, it's imagination and humans that reign in Scott's paintings. Scott is ever willing to see from alternate perspectives, ever inclined to use the literal as a mere springboard into the fantastic or at least untethered and unfamiliar--and he has faith that viewers of art can do that, too, without expectation that they will see and feel as he does . 

Even his "straightforward" portraits, like the one adjacent to this paragraph, are less dedicated to creating accurate physical likeness than to capturing a moment, feeling, or personality.** While such portraits sometimes stimulate less representational paintings, more often it's sketches and photographs that galvanize Scott to alter perspective, transform or oppose the literally present, make visible the possible and suggested. The paint itself also contributes to possibility. And the objects with which some models pose offer a further invitation to Scott's imagination.

Scott definitely has some strange objects with which models can pose! When he and I walk through fields that once belonged to dairy farms in western Massachusetts, he's apt to pick up bones of deceased cows that he later hangs in his studio within easy reach. Pieces of driftwood he's come upon in various other places sometimes show up in his paintings in one way or another.

Take, for example, "Down Dog," which I find terrifying and grotesque--but also fascinating and beautiful in the very different ways its two "halves" are painted. For Scott, the piece of driftwood with which the model posed metamorphosed into a sharp-toothed, blank-eyed, pitiless dog. So what's going on here? Who's dreaming whom? Is she dead or alive? Is there a kind of balancing act going on here, too? I have to wonder why Scott painted this painting and how the act of painting it made it evolve further in meaning, mystery, and conception. I'm sure, though, that part of him was just having fun.

While I've come to expect no answers to questions about meaning and significance from Scott, I do know--know from the authority of myself--that this painting celebrates imagination and the artist's right to exercise it. With this I can be fully, exuberantly on board: I often fear that we don't sufficiently celebrate imagination, our own and others', because, unleashed--perhaps like the dog in this painting--it might easily elude our control and force us, threaten to make us confront, what we'd rather dismiss as "unimaginable." And then, there's the possibility we might discover our preference for the abnormal and strange. People can lose friends and social position over such realizations.

But back to driftwood, which sometimes remains just wood, as "Bough" shows. I'm curious about the relationship between the figure and the bough, given the figure's embrace of the wood--but wait, that left hand, extended and open, seems to be pulling away from the wood: what's going on here? I have two unconfirmed thoughts about this painting. One is that Scott exaggerated the size of the piece of wood by placing one end of it in the magnifying foreground; the other is that this painting also is based on a rotated photograph, in which the piece of wood lay across the lap of the seated model. It's a very beautiful, strange painting--I love looking at it, and the word-loving part of me loves playing with the possible connection between "bough" and "bow."

There's soft, shimmering conventional beauty teamed with mystery in others of Scott's paintings of figures presented in relationship to important objects. The figure in "Nest Madonna" with her downcast, seemingly adoring eyes and blue shawl, brings to mind the Virgin of Guadalupe. But the nest, at least at first glance, is empty. Is the figure expecting it to be filled, a kind of Mary in the moments before she prayed the Magnificat--or has she come to accept its emptiness? 

But it also may be that the nest is not empty. I'm curious about the many-lined, slightly heart-shaped blue interior of the thick gray nest-suggesting ring: is that interior open and we're seeing part of the figure's shawl? Or are we seeing the cracked, many-fissured or many-veined blue heart that belongs to the figure? Or might it be that we're seeing a bunch of birch trees located in a world that one can visit only by passing through the circular nest? [Note: Scott just read the "Preview" version of this blog, and pointed out to me that there's a child's head wrapped in blue gauze in the nest.]

When I asked Scott if the model had posed with some kind of a circular object, even a tire, that he'd transformed into a nest, Scott explained that the model had posed with a relatively small harlequin mask wearing a crown. So the painting's nest was completely fabricated by Scott, though perhaps inspired by the mask and its crown's roundness. I can interpret it in so many different ways that I just have to keep looking at the painting.

There's one more painting, called Aim, that I want to share with you, only because it makes me think of Scott the artist and his relationship to the world. The figure's eye is trained on something beyond the edge of the canvas, beyond the reach of her intent gaze and leading fingertips. But really it's her whole body that's intent, aimed, directed toward whatever it is. Her strong thigh muscles are ready to hold that pose for as long as it takes; her eyes and her whole body are on the mysterious prize. 

Interestingly, the model in "Aim" is the same model who is in "Make For," which has been hanging in my living room for several years. In both paintings the figure is looking intently, but if titles are to believed, the figure in "Make For" is actually heading toward, or about to head toward whatever is below. The figure in "Aim," in contrast, is both planted and bearing down. There's a searingness in "Aim," a razor-sharpness, an urgency, an impatient trust--but a simultaneous staying put, looking from afar and looking deeply into.

I'm feeling that edgy urgency in many of the paintings that Scott's displaying this year. Maybe it has something to do with the pandemic; maybe not. But just in case you find that urgency at all baffling and intimidating, please know that Scott has deliberately hung his show so that certain somehow related paintings are juxtaposed, making it easier for visitors to enter into their worlds.

If you're intrigued, I hope you'll take a drive down to Rockland next weekend. So does Scott! I "figure" it will be time well-spent!

* By. “Marc Chagall / The Blue Circus / 1950 [1000 x 1317].” The Best Designs and Art from the Internet, Branipick, 4 Mar. 2018, https://art.branipick.com/marc-chagall-the-blue-circus-1950-1000-x-1317/.