The Art of Dichotomy

Karen Kaapcke paints emotions.

Mark Rothko was influenced by Nietzsche’s writings and Greek mythology and he set out to paint “emotions” on a canvas. Once he was left without any more emotions to paint, he killed himself.

Francisco Goya painted portraits of pretty women and men in their nobility attire then war and illness set in and he became withdrawn. He started to paint more loosely and his etchings detailed the horrors of war and his own emotional state.

Karen Kaapcke is the mother of a teenage boy. She has been painting his growth towards a manhood. She may not have realized it herself yet but I see a series of these in place. She has etchings, drawings and paintings filled with her own emotions as she observes him. Her thoughts of her son are transformed onto her paintbrush. When she starts out to paint she doesn’t always have a clear idea of the final outcome which to me is that of a mother observing a son soon to be out of her grasp.

In this unfinished painting loosely titled by me “a boy with his head in the clouds” is reminiscent of a Goya and Rothko in that there are two presence standing before us. That of the heavens and of the flesh. A mythological modern day god.

I asked her: When you stand in front of a blank canvas and are ready to start painting, what is the first thing you do? What do you do after that?

I stand there and for these paintings at least, I am not looking at a model, I am working from my mind, and so I have by the time I’m starting a very strong internal sense of the image, the figure. It is already alive in some sense in my mind’s eye. I draw it in charcoal or loose paint. And right after that I start thinking about light. For this one I had a sense of only painting flesh tones on part of the figure in the beginning so I quickly washed that in, leaving a lot of it back and white charcoal. I sensed also a division of space in the whole canvas early on, so the second step was to divide that up. But then it’s a process of listening to the painting and to the story of this adolescent and to make changes as it developed.

The presence of the boy in the painting is gigantic reaching to the sky with his head interrupting a cloud’s pattern. The steam of his thoughts escaping him. His torso is lanky, fleshy and translucent. The cropping of the hands from the painting is deliberate. Placing hands in this piece would have meant that the boy is reachable.

Goya’s painting of a giant Colossus reaches the stormy heavens. He is in turmoil ravishing a village. The villagers are running away in fear. Goya painted this piece loosely and deliberately.

In the sketch of Colussus 1, we see a solumn giant sitting upon the village, quiet peaceful with a moon hovering over his thoughts.

Rothko’s “Rust and Blue” also represent heaven and earth. A dichotomy.

Karen’s painting is telling me that distance and separation are soon to be inevitable. She sketches rain across the boy’s head with the number 14 dangling above his left ear. His age perhaps or the year the painting is to be completed? She is doing this the way parents measure their children’s growth against a wall. The boy is looking sideways. He does not confront his mother. He is establishing his own opinions. She captures the upper half of her son in the painting with the legs absent from view.

He can not run away. Not yet.

She is keeping him as close to her as possible. And with that comes the dichotomy, the bitter sweetness of motherhood.