The Art of Mother & Son

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Lately I’ve found myself marveling again at my mother’s watercolors - her seemingly simultaneous control over composition and gradations of color and capacity to make what I think of as her best paintings seem completely finished yet not dead: there’s wind in them. 
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Growing up with an artist who has this kind of skill who is your mother is odd, particularly when your father and brother and you have facility in art, too: it’s something you all can sort of do: it feels normal. But that acceptance can verge on complacency - it blunts your actually seeing what in this case Alice Kettelhack regularly brought off: a body of work slowly getting finer and more accomplished and, in the way of such things, quietly & progressively revealing her own deeper currents of temperament.
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It’s this I’m seeing & sensing more now as I spend more time with her skies and bays: a private intention which taught her the habit of art, not too much to call a burning need to burrow further into what she had so carefully nurtured into greater & more precise efficacy: her own skills of wielding a delicate wet brush into color and onto an absorbent page. She had turned herself into an instrument with an aim, and the results are all around me.
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My productions come from such a different source - it would take someone else to talk about them: I can only do them. But what a sweet irony that mother & son, so different in their output, now cohabit the same walls in such abundance! There’s something volatile and unpredictable in all of this juxtaposition - and some marvelous harmony in it too. Neither my mother nor I could have envisioned it. But here it is. And it changes and grows, just by being looked at, day after day.

Art really is alive in that way. So, in a way, therefore, is my mom.
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