So already, what's going on in the painting to the right? Are morning glories about to be trampled? Whose footprints are those? And why would someone want to trample those flowers anyway? Ultimately, what do you pay most attention to--the vibrancy of those innocent blue flowers, or the menace of those treading footsteps? Or are those flowers really so innocent? Maybe there is a mutuality here, a dangerous invitation proffered by them that elicits--even strives to elicit--the human impulse to master and even desecrate. And perhaps the invitation equally endangers both the flowers and the trampling soles--or is it souls?
The painting is called "But only those who leave for leaving," which is an English translation of a line from Charles Baudelaire's poem "Le Voyage."
Scott Ketcham's annual open studios will take place on Saturday, November 23 and Sunday, November 24 at the Sandpaper Factory in Rockland, MA (see bottom of this post for details). Among the works on display will be a number of paintings that will be featured in his solo show, "The Flowers of Evil," that will run will run from January 4 to February 22, 2025 at Ventress Memorial Library in Marshfield, MA.
Because Scott's paintings regularly portray tensions, I have tried in my blog over the years to convey how they make visible and alive the unsettling truth of such authentic "contradictions" as avoidant approach, luminous darkness, ascending descent, and the monstrous seductive. It was while contemplating the monstrous seductive that I first thought that the poetry of Charles Baudelaire would speak to Scott's soul--so I gave him a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) for Christmas. As I explained in another blog about Scott's work, "Given
Baudelaire's many poems about mysterious, voluptuous women, I imagined
that I would be stoking Scott's figure-painting fire . . . . So I was surprised when the book first inspired him to paint a series of floral still lifes." But hardly your typical pretty, reassuring floral still lifes.
There is something simultaneously irresistible and off-putting about Scott's tainted bouquets. Their hues, both natural and overripe, prompt vague alarm in the viewer. But the net effect of the balance embodied by flowers of themselves--vibrant with the thrust of brash brushstrokes but restrained by the fineness of thin lines scraped and etched--is a mesmerizing affirmation of life--but life necessarily (though not reluctantly) entwined with death. Baudelaire perceives the precipice and dances on it. Scott paints it.
Before you see more of Scott's paintings, a word about what you can expect from them in terms of how they reflect Baudelaire's poetry. Scott doesn't analyze Baudelaire's poems when he reads them; rather, he envisions them, allows the experience of them to wash over him. So the paintings you are about to see are not visual interpretations of entire poems; they are flights of painterly fancy inspired by words or phrases, especially as understood in the context of the sampled poem's mood and tone.
A few weeks back, curious about how Baudelaire's imagery, sensibilities, and themes were manifesting in Scott's paintings and knowing I'd soon be writing this blog, I visited Scott's studio. He'd laid out all the "Baudelaire paintings" on the floors so I could wander among them. I felt strangely like I was wandering through the "forêts de symboles" (forests of symbols) in Baudelaire's famous sonnet "Correspondances." And I LOVED what I was seeing.
Scott
is hardly the wayward frequenter of brothels, errant screw-up, and dedicated bad boy that Baudelaire was, but
his work has always conveyed the power of sensation; his belief in the glorious oneness of body and spirit; and his recognition that oneness can be
shaped by circumstance and choice--including warped by them.
Consequently, Scott's longtime fascination with darkness is evident in this new body of work. But that characteristic darkness is generally more enigmatic than oppressive. It suggests a transcendent reality reflecting the eternal struggle between--or maybe the fraught companionship of--light and dark, of life and death in all of their literal and figurative possibility.
Yes,
humans are mortal. Yes, they often choose to succumb to their desires with the
self-deceiving hope that immersion in those desires will liberate them. Yes, they
often use their power, especially their sexual and emotional power, to
control and manipulate others rather than to liberate themselves--check out "Stupidity, Delusion, Selfishness, and Lust,"* to the left. And yes, they
often disdain others' surrender to the inertia, malaise, and ennui that some societies tend to foster before surrendering to it themselves.
But artists have powerful imaginations that can lift them--and us--above the dulling, sinister mire, permitting both them and us to encounter the
angelic, the eternal, and the beautiful, if only fleetingly.**
And those artists, in addition, can render their encounters with the demonic, the dying, and the grotesque that are always lurking in the shadows of the
angelic, the eternal, and the beautiful. To paraphrase a line from Yeats, a terrible beauty can always be born*** when a passionate, skilled artist with a penetrating gaze sets to work. The creation of such beauty is the artist's foremost means of liberation and revolt, no matter how temporary.
Take, for example, "I dream of new flowers,"**** seen to the right. Those new flowers--are they an aesthetic improvement over the flowers we usually see in floral still lifes? They are if their creator is looking to disrupt a paralyzing norm, or to convey some hard, overlooked truth about the world that holds us in its clutches. I
love how the painting's red bulbous blooms emerge from leaves of seeming
twisted steel, suggesting an industrialized world that easily brushes
aside, disdains, even crushes the human.
But maybe Baudelaire's aesthetic and struggles aren't your thing, and you find yourself wondering, "Why would I want to engage with the products of such a perverse, tortured imagination?" In that case, I think you might simply enjoy the enigmatic qualities of Scott's paintings.
Take, for example, the painting on the left. What first catches your eye: the woman's lovely face and her intense engagement with the flowers? her slender fingers spreading themselves out lusciously among the delicate white daisies? or the gray-faced man who seems to be enduring having his skull serve as a planter? Its title, "The things we loathed became the thing we love," comes from the introductory poem to Les Fleurs du Mal.* But who exactly is loathing whom or what? And does it redeem us or debase us if we do come to love what we loathed?
Then there are these two paintings, both of which bring Medusa to my mind.***** As the Book of Genesis says, "Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made." But which of the women above is more subtle? more disempowering and dangerous? Are both to be equally feared--and pitied? When are the feared to be pitied, and the pitied to be feared? And did Medusa relish or hate being Medusa, anyway?
I leave you, "Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!" ("hypocrite Reader — my double — my brother [/sister"]") with these questions, and an invitation to come to Scott's open studios later this month. I'd love you to experience Scott's poems inspired by Baudelaire's "sickly flowers."****** Thank you for reading, and hoping to see you in Rockland, Marshfield, or both.
** As Baudelaire explains it in "L'Albatros" ("The Albatross"), The Poet is like that wild inheritor of the cloud,
A rider of storms, above the range of arrows and slings;
Exiled on earth, at bay amid the jeering crowd,
He cannot walk for his unmanageable wings.
