Holiday Greetings, But Not Holiday Cards

So already, 'tis the season--at least it has been over the years in my life--for mailing Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Year's cards near and far. But this year, for the most part, I'll be depending on email and Facebook to extend my holiday greetings. 

 

I'm not 100% comfortable with my decision. 

 

In part, it's about money. In the last couple of months, a broken living room window and a broken tooth have unexpectedly broken the bank. Well, I'm exaggerating--couldn't resist the third "broken." But, in truth, once I was done paying for first two brokens, it made the most sense to send the dollars I had left to organizations that aid people needing food, clothing, and housing during these inflationary times, and not to spend them on holiday cards and postage stamps.

 

And in part, my decision is about time. With the arrival of our first nearly post-pandemic holiday season, so many people, understandably, are determined to revive the holiday traditions that pandemic protocols had forbidden. For me, that's meant more face-to-face singing and visiting with people, both of which need to be coordinated around visits to my mother on the skilled nursing floor (SNF) of her senior living facility. 

 

At the same time, I haven't wanted to give up those pursuits that kept me balanced and afloat during the last two years. And often, I just need to do nothing at the end of a day that's been plenty long enough. So when I tried to envision adding card-writing to my December plate, I felt dispirited and overwhelmed.

The thing is, when I have time and the right kind of head space, I love writing Christmas cards. When there's time to respond to some piece of news that's arrived in a Christmas card just received or to otherwise personalize* my message to an old or new friend, I feel like I'm affirming or reaffirming a relationship that matters to both me and that friend. The idea of not doing that bothers me.

I also love getting holiday cards and being on the receiving end of the good feeling that they always engender. The greeting card I picked up the other day at my local CVS--see the adjacent photograph--reminded me of that feeling. I love December in part because chances are good that when I go to my mailbox, I'll find one or more pieces of mail that are personal, lovely or fun to look at, and cheering. The holiday season makes me want to go to my mailbox.

I have so many memories of returning home after a school day that felt like two, opening my mailbox in my apartment building's foyer--two different foyers since I was thirty-two--and grinning as I recognized the greeting cards among the bills and fundraising requests. The shape of their envelopes alerted me to the possibility of their being personal mail; handwritten addresses and familiar return addresses I identified as belonging to homes, not businesses and organizations, also clued me in.

 

Whatever else needed to get done that afternoon, I found the time to sit on my sofa and pore over the cards, letters, and photos those envelopes variously contained, and to think about the friends and relatives who'd sent them. 

So how can I not send cards when I know how wonderful it is receive cards? I remind myself that this is a decision for this year, not forever.

There is another reason for my decision. Holiday greetings, when they do more than convey good wishes and good cheer, tend to report what people have been doing, what's been filling their hours or what's stood out as the year's highlights. I enjoy reading about these. What's generally rarer, though, are the holiday cards that share what's been going on in their writers' brains and hearts, especially those thoughts and feelings that have been much in control of the year's narrative.

2022 was basically a good year for me--not entirely without its dark days, but with many bright spots. But were I to list its highlights, they wouldn't tell you what's mattered most to me this year, namely my regular visits to my mother, who's in the late stages of Alzheimer's, and her fellow residents on the part of the SNF at her senior living facility that's particular designated for those with advanced cognitive and memory impairments. During this past year, I've spent so much time wondering what it's like to be her and them.

I began wondering this seriously around Thanksgiving 2021 when one of the activity leaders helped all the SNF residents to create a large tree wall-hanging. Attached to the tree's branches were leaves, one per resident, stating what each was particularly grateful for.

There were some common responses, such as gratitude for family and gratitude for being cared for kindly and well in such a nice place. But what surprised me were the number of explicit expressions of gratitude for being alive. All SNF residents face one or more serious challenges and limitations that require them to receive considerable care and support; hence their presence on the floor. And despite these challenges and limitations, they treasure life, and their own lives in particular. My able-bodied, able-minded self was humbled by this.

 

So much of daily SNF life is communal, and that fact has made my regular presence there both lovely and sad. There's always someone new to the floor whom I remember from her more active, self-sufficient days in the independent living and assisted living parts of the community. And there's always someone dying, most recently the very quiet woman who for several months sat across the table from my mother at mealtime, and whom I remembered as a very dedicated, energetic congregant at Temple Ohabei Shalom twenty-five years ago.

And then there are those wonderful shared activities that engage everyone in happy ways that I think are meaningful to the residents, though I'm not exactly sure how. For example, last Thursday, while a group of us sat around a long table on my mother's part of the floor waiting for some cookies to finish baking, we listened to one of the the activity coordinators read a story about a young woman who feared the worst--unnecessarily--because her boss had asked to speak to her. As the activity coordinator served the just-cooled cookies, she asked the residents what their first jobs had been and what memories they had of their bosses. Everyone spoke, although perhaps not always truthfully: a few of the other family members present were surprised by what they heard. 

 

One thing I've noticed during such activities is that the residents generally don't interact with one another yet seem to be much aware that the others are present. So, for example, when I ask my mother, who sleeps a lot and tends to speak little, whether she wants to take a walk or to stay with the group, she usually wants to stay with the group. I don't know what it means to her to be part of it, but it is what she chooses. I've also noticed that whoever is in charge always speaks to her as if any minute she might decide to say more. I think she's glad to be alive, though I don't think she could think and say that in any coherent way. I do know that when I ask her if she's having a good day, her "yes" answers are always very emphatic.

 

I often think of my mother and her cohort as flowers that thrive in the shade.** That said, for someone such as myself who's frequently taught The Odyssey  and James Joyce's "The Dead,"*** the word "shade" invariably conjures thoughts of the dead. Homer refers to the dead whom Odysseus encounters when he visits the underworld to consult with the prophet Teiresias as shades. And speculating that his aunt's death will occur in the not-so-distant future, Gabriel muses to himself, " Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade . . .. He had caught the haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal" (224).

If I've been thinking about mortality a lot this year, I suspect it's because of my age and my mother's situation. When I learned from her obituary that the woman whom I recognized from Temple Ohabei Shalom had no children, I, also childless, wondered how she'd come to be on the SNF, who'd visited her, who'd looked out for her, who'd helped her make difficult decisions when she'd needed help, and even made them for her when she no longer could. I've been wondering who will be there to look out for me and Scott, should we both live to old age, once we're not there to look out for each other. Scott, in contrast to me, and in part because his own ninety-seven-year-old father still manages to live quite independently, isn't worried about this.

Please don't worry that I'm dwelling on this too much. If anything, my consciousness of it has been leading me to make better use of the life and time that I have and that I am healthy and independent enough to be able to enjoy. It's certainly contributed to my decision not to write my usual two hundred holiday cards this year and to walk in the salt marsh instead.

 

It's also made me feel privileged to be part of the world of my mother and her co-residents. The SNF staff recognizes and treats them as individual people rather than as incarnations of old age and dementia waiting at death's door. Regardless of the amount of care they need and others' beliefs about the quality and meaning of their days, the living are the living until they cease to breathe and become the dead, period. 

 

Somehow, I just couldn't imagine writing those last sentences in a Christmas card, but they're very important to me. Still, I've wanted to be in touch with the many people who matter so much to me; hence this blog, among other things.

Next year, I hope that many of you will go to your mailboxes on some distinctly seasonal December day and discover a holiday card from me. As for now, though, I close by sending you warm wishes for happy holidays, whichever one(s) you celebrate, and for a bright, fulfilling new year.  Love and joy come to you.

 

* Yes, I split the infinitive.

** Screen shot of photo on Wikipedia Shade Garden entry: on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shade_garden

*** Joyce, J. (1993). "The Dead". In Dubliners. New York, NY: Penguin Books.  

"The Vanished House": A Poem

So already,  I first met Margaret Atwood's poem "Shapechangers in Winter" last year around the time of the winter solstice, and I actually wrote about it in  a blog I posted on New Year's Eve day 2021. 

I thought of that poem today as I listened to the Broad Cove Chorale, the Hingham-based women's choral group I sang with before the COVID19 pandemic. Among the pieces they sang in their holiday concert were musical settings of poems by Christina Rossetti, William Blake, and Robert Lowell.

Thinking of all of these poems reminded me that last December, I wrote a poem in gratitude to three winter poets: Margaret Atwood, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Frost. 

The image* that most inspired it was that of the vanished house in the third section of Atwood's poem. Musing on it, I had recalled Wallace Stevens' poem "The Snow Man," which added to the haunting idea and image collection I was beginning to build. 

Sensing a need to pin my gathering impressions and ideas to something familiar, something already in my bones, I thought of a Robert Frost poem that I think you'll be able to identify without my revealing its name. It's one of those "great American poems"  that so many of us encountered as middle school or high school students learning to read and hopefully love poetry. It may be the poem's meter and rhyme scheme that most help you identify the Frost poem, so let its music wash over you or carry you. 

So here it is: my very allusive poem, "The Vanished House."  

 

The man who owned these woods, it’s said, 

Lived on this spot, but now is dead. 

The village folk, they think it queer  

That his fine house should disappear. 

 

But others theorize otherwise, 

Themselves compelled by winter skies 

When snow and evening jointly fall 

Erasing home, erasing all.  

 

In a state of winter mind, 

They think he left his house behind, 

Found a strong will buried deep, 

A promise to himself to keep. 

 

And when he from that house self-banished-- 

That was when it up and vanished. 

The neighbor’s mare, who must have seen,

Shook her bells once and stayed serene. 

 

A vanished house no secrets keeps,

No view obscures of woodland deeps, 

No varnished truths perpetuates-- 

So, over time, it liberates.

 

It let him choose fresh-fallen snow,

A wood instead of house to go. 

And now, he breathes the cold in deep 

And smiles inside, and wants no sleep.  

                     

In town the neighbors still seek clues--

They stare at wood chips, frosted screws--

And looking back, and at, and near,

See not the house set to appear.

* Adjacent photo is a screenshot of Pixneo photo:https://pixnio.com/nature-landscapes/winter/forest-snow-winter-wood-tree-frost-cold-landscape-branch

Journeying to the Springhouse: Joyce Wilson's Most Recent Poetry Collection

So already, sometimes we know what we know and have always known. Sometimes, we suddenly know again what we once knew. And sometimes, we know what we didn't know in the past and still may not know. Our recollected experiences of knowing, not knowing, and yearning to know may compel us return to the places, moments, and people we associate with those experiences. 

In her collection of poems To the Springhouse, Joyce Wilson returns to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where she grew up, and encounters again the landmarks, events, and phenomena that both held fast and set free her younger self, significantly shaping her adult self. 

The poems are not arranged chronologically, although clusters of them are. As readers, we encounter a two-part array in which renderings of the poet's/speaker's experiences as a daughter and sister growing from childhood to young womanhood intertwine with her observant, imaginative immersion in the abundant natural world that surrounds her. Repeatedly, nature and language work together to illuminate.

Three poems, including the collection's final one, recount visits to a springhouse close to the speaker's childhood home. Clearly, springhouses, built above springs to protect them from plants, animals, and other potential contaminants, matter. But why and how? I wondered this as I set off with the poet on her pilgrimage, sometimes guided by her, sometimes left to wander on my own, and often provided with the glimpses of the developing sensibilities of the future poet and current editor of the online literary magazine Poetry Porch.

I knew I wanted to make the journey as soon as I read the collection's first poem. In "Field Trip," the speaker--from now on, I will refer to the "I" in most of these poems as the speaker, though it may well always be Wilson--returns to a remembered farm and creek, the waters of which are "like the rivers in my dreams." Clearly, she has been returning to this place long before her actual return visit to it (11), for reasons not yet disclosed or even suggested.

Once actually there, she carries with her the guidebook her parents used to nurture her budding naturalist self. In truth, she's been so well guided by it and them that she doesn't need the book to identify the Bluecurls** she comes upon. 

But there's more going on here than just classification of the natural world, as rich as it is: a humble pilgrim "bending close" to examine the flower she's plucked, the speaker becomes swept up in "Imagined waves" (11). Of water? of emotion? And has she surrendered to the power of the waves with resignation? relief? joy?

She expresses gratitude to her parents in the next-to-last stanza: ". . . through them I had learned/ To see and sound, identify and name,/ Forgotten till today when I returned"--and in part because of their naturalist legacy, Wilson regularly and imaginatively explores the names of natural things in her poems*** (12). 

But her thankfulness is tempered in the final stanza. The lines "The lessons that they fostered festered in/My memory," both delight and trouble us: at the same moment that we relish the playful juxtaposition of the similarly sounding "fostered" and "festered," we confront the negative connotation of "festered." There's something toxic in at least some of what the speaker has learned from her parents (12). Her own home hasn't been fully effective as a springhouse: it hasn't completely protected the clear, pure waters of her early life from everything that might fester in them. But probably no childhood home ever does.

Whatever the balance of time and toxicity that renders her parents' lessons "as good as dispossessed," I as her reader am now forewarned: during her Chadds Ford visit, she may well come upon other phenomena that resurrect what has been "Forgotten till today." Thanks to the poem's terse suggestiveness, I am prepared for what the speaker and I might encounter.

This is the moment that I make full disclosure: as a longtime high school English teacher, I taught The Odyssey dozens of times and often perceive its themes and motifs in other literature. So the minute "Field Trip" forewarned, submerged its protagonist in "Imagined waves," and offered guides and protectors who couldn't be completely trusted, I felt that I was on an epic journey as well as a pilgrimage. Immediately, I surmised--and hoped--that by the end of the book, reconciliation, wisdom, and metaphorical homecoming would all be achieved. But I also anticipated trouble along the way, and perhaps even an enlightening visit to the realms of the dead--and wasn't surprised that the next three poems developed some of these motifs while suggesting the speaker's challenges and providing some lessons for successfully navigating them:

• In "Egret," a seemingly displaced yet regal waterbird--a suitable symbol for the speaker, though she casts herself as the observer in this poem--"Found its catch while no one looked/ Beneath the surface of the brook (13)." The lesson: careful looking is a prerequisite for seeing, seeking, and finding, and the answers may be under water.

• In "To the Springhouse," an authoritative museum guide wrongfully explains to the speaker's adult self that the primary function of springhouses is and always has been to refrigerate the items stored in them. The speaker dismisses his pronounced knowledge:

But what did he know? Such a pragmatic mind

Might never pause to comprehend the source

Of mystery, where springs will come and go. (14)

The lesson: poor guides are everywhere and must be exposed, and mystery may be trustworthy.

• In "Changing Surfaces," the speaker, watching stones arrange and rearrange themselves at the tidal water's edge, explains, "I seek treasures, origins, what I first/ / Thought, or what I thought I might have meant." A stone "glimmers" momentarily until a wave sweeps it out of view. The lesson: water reveals, but also mirrors and distorts, and treasures that suddenly shine bright may just as suddenly disappear. Meanwhile, when the speaker muses, "How close the words: treasure and erasure," the reader recognizes the speaker's love of language and her sense of its power (15).

The heroes of epic poems learn the hard way, and perhaps pilgrims do too as they walk the path to enlightenment and transformation. The road may be even more fraught for female heroes and pilgrims, whose learning may be discouraged, especially if it refuses to bow to male authority. "The Mushroom Barn" blends scenes of home with encounters with nature in the context of rumor and legend. As such, it presents a dilemma for smart girls like the speaker and her sister: though they "feared what we did not know, " they dared not act to remedy the situation because of the story they'd heard about "the local girl/ who walked through fields at night, . . . ,/ . . . because she had learned too much" (21).

Interestingly, right after "The Mushroom Barn," we accompany the speaker to the realm of the dead. In "Our Father's Death," as its title suggests, she recollects the death of her father, the knowledge of which "came abstractly/ like a concept without color or odor" (22). In "Aftermath," the following poem, she laments that "Only our father would have known"--her father who is "now so thoroughly gone"--how to respond to her mother's angry, unanticipated questions about a favorite play (23). Like the archetypal epic hero, the speaker is now thoroughly and sadly on her own.

And then, things somehow move forward, although almost imperceptibly, as they often do when people, including pilgrims and heroes, wander in confusion, pain, and grief. In "The Brook," the first poem in the second part of the collection, the speaker**** asks directly for knowledge of the natural world--

I asked the brook to show

its knowledge of the world;

it raised the image of my face

but never said a word. (35)

-- and receives a silent but useful answer that elevates her as a source of knowledge in the world--which doesn't mean she no longer needs guidance. When "My heart took flight," she again "lost my way," but only "until I saw the brook emerge/ and lead me on again" (35). She has both the brook and herself to guide her.

That disappearing but reappearing brook again brings to mind the springhouse that is so central to Wilson's collection. Like the land in "The Brook," springhouses temporarily conceal from view the life-giving waters that run beneath them. As such, they are both impediments and godsends.

In "The Springhouse," the second of the collection's three springhouse poems, recounts a visit to the springhouse***** by the speaker and her sister. Though "Our father" has warned them not to enter it so as not to dislodge the settled, accumulated particles that might pollute the water flowing beneath it, he leaves it unlocked, more evidence of the contradictory world the two sisters inhabit. Initially, the sisters do no more than peer in fearfully. But eventually, summoning their shared developing emotional and intellectual independence, they venture inside to "look into the nature of our dreams" and to grow in understanding of their deepest selves. Daring to disobey, they risk with some confidence that "what the stillness kept/ Would tolerate the echoes of our screams," trust that their liberating screams will not loose destruction and corruption upon the world (39).

 

"The Springhouse in Winter," the collection's final poem, is one of my favorites. Elegiac, optimistic, and deeply musical, it provides the reconciliation, liberation, and peace that I had hoped for when I began walking the path with the speaker. The rhythmic and sonic regularity of its four quatrains, each composed of lines written in iambic pentameter with alternating rhyme, propels the reader forward with a sense that harmony has been restored, that all is at least well enough. The speaker speaks for a "we" that I think is her sister and herself, though it might also denote her own reconciled adult and childhood selves. A combination of "healing solar forces" and "centuries of rain" creates the perpetual water, and the sisters' "rages dissipate inside this house" (60): history has not changed, but the sisters' perspectives have, making "The Springhouse in Winter" a poem of forgiveness and gratitude that does not erase the complex memories explored elsewhere in the collection. The poem ends with a beautiful offering that I leave you to discover when you read the poem. I want you to have the experience of coming upon it as I did.

I love this brave, beautiful book, admire the many layers of each of its poems. In fact, reading the poems reminds me of looking through water******: various ones of them reveal, conceal, magnify, reflect, clarify, and distort. But together, they become an enlightening if always shifting mosaic, a reminder of the power of poetry--the act of writing it, the act of reading it--to make life more comprehensible, bearable, and meaningful. If you wish to purchase To the Springhouse, please visit the home page of The Poetry Porch; there you will find a link that will enable you to contact the magazine to buy a copy. 

Addendum on December 2: A friend who read this blog left the following comment about it on my Facebook page, and it really got me thinking:

Thank you for sharing this! The poems sounded so thoughtful and had so many layers even from just the small samples in your blog. Each layer just pulled me in a little more until I felt as though I would totally submerge if I read the whole poem. It would be a pleasant submersion, I think.

Her experience of the poems' layers made me realize that for me, reading Wilson's poems was an experience of being in the stream not because its waters were covering me, but  because I was walking in it on stepping stones, each of the poems being one of them. Some of the stones were slippery, some wiggled under my feet, and sometimes my feet got wet, but the great thing was that I could always look straight down into the water.

 * Wilson, J. (2022). To the springhouse: Poems by Joyce Wilson. Massachusetts: The Poetry Porch. 

** Image of Trichostema dichotomum L. from Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center: https://www.wildflower.org/gallery/result.php?id_image=88498

*** Wilson's poem "The Etymology of Spruce," published in Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poems, is a great example of a poem that reveals the power of named natural things to inspire Wilson's poetic imagination.

**** Photograph of the photograph of the poet by John Goldie on the back cover of To the Springhouse. I love how the poet is reflected in the window through which she looks.

***** Screen shot of photo on the Maguire Farm web site: https://www.maguirefarm.com/s/springhouse.htm

******"Flume" by Scott Ketcham: https://www.scottketcham.com/image/96303927162

The Eyes Have It (Perhaps): Scott Ketcham's Latest Paintings

So already, a couple of Saturdays ago when I walked into my husband Scott Ketcham's studio in Rockland, Massachusetts, I fell in love with the first painting I saw. Was it the figure's benign facial expression and gentle, self-effacing, down-tilted gaze? Was it the humble way she seemed to be bearing or even offering a bird's nest, a place of natural protection and birth? Or was it the painting's palate--the vivid yet shadowy magentas and periwinkles that made her flesh and the space behind her distinguishable but inseparable?

When I suggested to Scott that I saw a bird's nest, he made no reply: from his perspective, the authority for what is seen in a painting always resides in its individual viewer. But if you're someone who knows that I usually publish a blog about his most recent work just weeks before his annual open studios--scheduled this year for Saturday, November 19 and Sunday, November 20--you also know that I can't resist identifying, interpreting, seeking patterns, and highlighting moments of comfort and understanding as I confront so much that disturbs or baffles me, as beautiful as I can see that it is.

What famous painting--maybe with subject matter from Greek mythology?--did this mesmerizing painting recall, given the figure's peaceful affect and the bow in her hair? When "Flora Gave Me Fairest Flowers"* ran through my head, I went Flora hunting--and found Botticelli's "Primavera." There was Flora--the adjacent image** is a detail from that painting--her face framed by her accessorized hair, her neck encircled by a wreath reminiscent of the aforementioned bird's nest, her placid gaze more inward-focused than outward-directed. 

With Flora in mind, I thought of a recent Scott painting full of fairest flowers. The figure in it gazes somewhat vaguely, perhaps oblivious to the sunflowers that frame her, or perhaps fully immersed in their summer glory. If she is musing on something else or on nothing--which would distinguish her from the woman in the first painting who holds the bird's nest tenderly--what transpired shortly before the moment of the painting? What untold backstories explain why various figures in Scott's paintings seem to have withdrawn at least somewhat into their own private worlds?

This kind of mystery and ambiguity, which I enjoy encountering when I look at many of Scott's works, contrasts with at least two varieties of mystery and ambiguity:

• It contrasts with the resolvable mystery initially created by "Primavera." Who are the people gathered in this painting, created to a be a prominent Italian groom's wedding present to his wife, and why are they here together?*** So the scholars asked, and learned. Flora and the scantily clad, aggressively pursued figure to her left are actually the same person: the goddess-nymph Chloris, whom we see here in the process of being abducted and raped by Zephyrus, eventually marries him and becomes known by her Roman name, Flora. According to Ovid, she is happy in her marriage. Hmmm . . . 

• It also contrasts with the bizarre mystery conjured by some of Scott's more abstract, less traditionally portrait-like paintings. One of Scott's shock-and-awe painting depicts a female figure emerging from the head of a bull. The bull's horns are menacing. The eyes we can see clearly are the bull's, and they shine blank and bright--or are they a little sad and spent? The bull's head seems shaped like a mermaid's tail.

Is the figure destined to be part-human/part-animal?  Or is she emerging into full humanness? With her body stretched upward and her crossed arms framing her head, she seems triumphant, despite those horns that are perilously close to her breasts. We can't see her eyes, but the stern concentration of her gaze suggests she's completely engaged in the process of emerging. But what will happen to her next? While some of Scott's paintings raise questions of what happened before, others make us wonder what will happen next.

 

But truthfully, if there are stories that Scott's paintings tell, they're more existential than individual. Though there's action in some of them that suggests chronology and cause and effect, I believe they pose broader questions of meaning more than they raise circumstantial, painting-specific questions. As I looked at three very different paintings, all dominated by the color red, I found myself thinking of the title (translated from the French) of Gauguin's huge famous painting in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

 

The first of them terrified me: was this crouching creature human? Was it perching on something courtesy of an outsized talon? Or growing tree-like out of a bulbous clump of roots? Was it in an early or late stage of development, pre-natal or post-natal, or even post-mortem? Could it think? feel? Was it free? In pain? And were those black sockets seeing eyes? If so, did they want to see? Whatever was Scott thinking as he painted this rorschach-esque creature--or did its consciousness or unconsciousness guide him?

 

The second one I loved immediately because of the serene face of the woman and her obvious love of the sphere in her hands, which I immediately understood as the head of someone she loved deeply. Even when I realized that I actually didn't know what she was holding, her tender and exclusive focus on it soothed me. And my positive feelings stayed intact even when I realized that the sphere seemed to be an outgrowth of the innards of her body. Despite this very strange possibility, her loving gaze kept me loving this painting.

The third one made me laugh, though it distinctly disturbed me. Was this figure with her Mickey Mouse-ear hairdo crazy or feigning crazy? Her eyes were open, I was sure, but was her gaze directed or blank? This painting more than the previous one seemed to have a story behind it: where was she--in some Bedlam-like institution? And what had brought her to this place and state? Whatever the case, she looked like she was about to spring, and I didn't want her to spring toward me.****

 

Interestingly, the model in this third painting is also featured in a much more representational painting that Scott will also be showing in a couple of weeks. In it, she extends a confident, provocative sexual invitation--I love the forward slope of her right shoulder and the easy way her hand rests suggestively in the black crevice in the foreground. She's one of the few figures in Scott's new work who gazes directly at the painting's viewer, perhaps because she is clearly seeking a reaction and connection, though she's sure to control whatever interaction follows it.

 

But where are these figures, and where do they come from? Do they live primarily in Scott's imagination and then in our own after we encounter them? And if they emanate from inside us, or summon that which does, what answers to Gauguin's three questions do they suggest? 

 

I don't know, but in a number of instances, even when the central figure has no eyes at all, the painting's mysteriousness is soothing and familiar, shadowy rather than monstrous. One of my favorite of such paintings is monochromatic, soft, and gentle, somewhat domestic if abstract. I don't know what the figure is tenderly looking down on, tending gently, cherishing connection to, but the relationship between her and it seems real, intentional, and loving.

Similarly in this next painting, arresting with its vibrant red and blues, the Rapunzel-like figure--her black hair gleams red and then whirls around to become the glossy, swirling bowl-- seems to be relishing the evolving, circular presence taking shape against her smoothing hands and forearms. What exactly is it? It gleams like a bowl of glossy, sweet red frosting--which is perhaps the most naive way I might describe this highly inviting red hollow that conveys both fullness and a waiting to be filled. She and it together invite, despite--or maybe because of--her downcast gaze.

I'm also fascinated by her crossed arms: not only do they chastely cover her breasts, conveying a modesty that partners naturally with her voluptuous sexuality and fertility, but in terms of form, they suggest the eternal and the infinite, echoing the symbol for infinity. What is going on in this painting has always gone on and always will go on, in the world, and in painting. It's in Scott's paintings, and in Botticelli's.

 

And what's eternal, ongoing, and infinite is not just a content thing. On October 25 while reading the Boston Globe, I came upon a photo**** related to the celebration on Diwali, a national holiday in India, the day before. There was a beautiful, serene young woman, her headscarf gracefully extending along her arm, which lovingly curled around a flat, round dish holding many candles upon which her eyes gazed with so much pleasure. There was that same form, the product of the graceful circling, that I'd seen in various ones of Scott's paintings. 

 

And do eyes ever not matter in terms of conveying emotion and thought, in terms of pushing the inner outward? Our human natures predispose us across time and space to engage with our own experiences and Gauguin's questions as we seek meaning. As we wonder and wrestle, others' eyes sometimes entreat us, sometimes inform us, sometimes excite us, sometimes dismiss us, sometimes baffle us. In response, our own eyes often reveal us, whether or not we want to be revealed.

 

There's a lot to wonder about, and Scott's paintings, with their abundant light, darkness, beauty, and love served up with compelling ambiguity, fuel that wondering. Come see with your own eyes at Scott's open studios***** (part of the 4th Floor Artists Open Studios).

* A madrigal composed by John Wilbye.  

** Spring (Primavera). Detail: Flora on Arthive https://arthive.com/sandrobotticelli/works/536246~Spring_Primavera_Detail_Flora

*** File on WikiMedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Botticelli-primavera.jpg from http://www.googleartproject.com/collection/uffizi-gallery/artwork/la-primavera-spring-botticelli-filipepi/331460/

**** The Boston Globe attributed this photo in its print edition (p. A4) to Biju Boro affiliated with Getty Images. 

***** Scott's studio is located on the fourth floor of the Sandpaper Factory at 83 E. Water Street in Rockland, MA. Scott's web site is https://www.scottketcham.com/. It should be updated with his newest work by Monday, November 7.