ACT THREE ART SHOW - Guy Kettelhack's creatures to appear in THEATERLAND nyc - May 11, 2012 - September 2012
Here's an artist statement & c.v. I've been asked to provide for an art show I'll be having at Gallery New World Stages, 343 west 49th street, nyc ny 10010, 10 a.m. - 6 pm, starting May 11 (opening) thru September 2012. I'll be taking up the 2nd floor gallery with 32 drawings & a bit of multi-media vids & stuff. Come on by.
("A Bee Than Whom" pic will appear on the postcard -- hence its having been affixed here)
ARTIST STATEMENT – “Act Three – Drawings & Poems”
As the child of two artists, I received two extraordinary gifts. One was a luck-of-the-draw DNA aptitude for drawing. But the greater gift was learning, in the demonstration of their lives, that art is essential. It is not a hobby, a minor pastime – something to do only when you’re not doing something more important. It can be the center of a life. Making it the center of my life took decades: the drawings you see here are the product of a very circuitous journey. As a kid, drawing was what got me the most attention. But writing, which by adulthood took the form of a good number of solo and collaborative nonfiction books – and music, specifically playing the violin – soon took over. For whatever reasons, art pretty much went underground from my 20s to – well, April Fools Day 2009, when, about a month short of my 58th birthday, I sat down to do the first drawing I’d done in years – aimed at accompanying one of the poems I had started writing about 12 years before. It wasn’t a big moment – just a matter-of-fact “I think I’ll do a drawing.” I’ve done one – with an accompanying poem – pretty much every day since. The drawing almost always comes first. Over the past few years, each of them has insisted on adding creatures to a menagerie of characters which is probably becoming loopier and loopier as I go on. A good friend of mine calls them supernatural. They come out of nowhere. The great adventure for me is to sit, as I do every day at about 4 p.m., in front of a blank sheet of paper without an idea in my head – let the pencil start moving. When I’m done I prop the drawing up next to my computer screen where – against all odds, as it seems to me – a poem begins to form itself – in the same strange half-conscious way. They don’t so much illustrate each other as agree to be seen with one another. But they do seem to want to share the spotlight. I don’t know what else to say about what I do – except that the experience of it, over time, has brought me to the closest understanding I’ve yet had that the essence of a good life consists in finding one’s work, and doing it. This is my work. I call this enterprise “Act Three” because I’m living my own third act, and every creature that keeps tumbling out of me wants to get on stage before the play ends. “Act Three” is dedicated to my muse, my confidante, my beloved soulmate Donna Boguslav, without whom my creative life would not, in the form it’s taken, be remotely possible.
Guy Kettelhack
April 12, 2012
C.V.
Guy Kettelhack is the author or co-author of more than 25 nonfiction books. Among his solo efforts: “Easing the Ache,” “Dancing Around the Volcano,” “The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp,” the Hazelden recovery book series, “First Year Sobriety,” “Second Year Sobriety” and “Third Year Sobriety.” His poems have appeared online and in print in a variety of venues and quarterlies, including Van Gogh’s Ear, Melic Review, New Pleiades, Malleable Jangle, WORM 33, Das Alchymist Poetry Review, the PK list, The Rose & Thorn, Heretics & Half-Lives, Desert Moon Review, Hiss Quarterly, Juked, Anon, Umbrella Journal, Loch Raven Review, Mississippi Crow and The Chimaera. Several of his poems have placed in IBPC competitions since 2004, his poem “Alter Ego” was selected as a quarterfinalist in the Lyric Recovery competition in March 2004, and he won the Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for Traditional Verse in November 2004. 20 of his poems appeared in the New Pleiades Anthology of 2005.
Artwise, a collage and art book of his appeared in a book art exhibition at Leslie/Lohman Gallery curated by Norman Shapiro in 2002. His drawings and poems have appeared in Mississippi Crow, Autumnsky Poetry, Loch Raven Review and Rattle. Some of his drawings will appear in an upcoming inspirational book by Barry Lipscomb. He’s currently working on the first of a series of his own poem and art books.
Guy is a violinist who plays mainly with the Broadway Bach Ensemble in New York City. He’s a graduate of Middlebury College and has done graduate work at the Bread Loaf School of English and the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies. He studied (briefly) at the Juilliard School of Music in his teens and (briefly) at Lincoln College, Oxford University in his 20s. He is besotted with New York City and cannot imagine living elsewhere. He is also besotted with Prismacolor markers.
