Adorned: Portraits of the New West

article by Kelsey Merritt & Megan Crawford

*Garden Bear, scratchboard and acrylic gouache. 10˝x12˝*

The American West exists in mythological creatures: the outlaw story of Billy the Kid, the aim of Annie Oakley, the controversial celebration of General George Armstrong Custer, and the ever-present regal shoulders of the great American bison. Amidst these tropes and their likeness found in various art mediums lies an unassuming scratchboard. A creative process often remembered as a childhood activity that magically changed black paper to rainbow lines with a toothpick, Kaetlyn Able has taken the scratchboard and elevated it to new levels in Western Nouveau art.

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Line by line, scratch by scratch, Able takes typologies of western fauna: from the mighty bison of the plains to the smallest field mouse, and adorns them with clover flowers and dandelion seeds. In some of her more recent work, the historical figures of the past fade into the background as Able refocuses on the smallest creatures that situated the West— outside of the people whose confrontations disrupted it.

A mother of two, Able sets aside time on Saturdays for drawing found objects with her children. During her own childhood, Able spent hours drawing, leading her to oil painting as a focus at Wellesley College. Her favorite part of art, though, is experimenting: drawing, painting, mixed media, acrylics, watercolors. While she was working on her MFA at the Museum School in Boston, Able was a TA in an undergrad class called Art as Process, which pushed her to focus on her process over product. “It kind of got me hooked on always moving and looking for different media.” From there, she began experimenting with a variety of mediums, focusing on collages until she stumbled on a scratchboard book in the library that showed her what was possible in the medium. In 2008, she began to work in scratchboard, leaving behind the traditional oil paintings of her first degree.

Growing up in Massachusetts, Able was always drawn to Montana. “My favorite babysitter was from Montana, so in the 5th grade, I did a state report on Montana. My mom still has it!” When she met her husband, Able was excited to learn he was from Montana. Finally, after following a business opportunity for her husband in 2011, the family of three moved to Montana. In the years that followed, Able cared for her family full-time, honed her craft, had another baby, and survived breast cancer.

Kaetlyn Able is modest in her discussions of her artwork and life story, but passionate as she describes her process and work ethic. “I think people think about the romantic lightning strike of ideas and inspiration, but I don’t think that’s the best route for most people.” In 2016, Able dedicated herself to scratchboard. “It was so cool to see how consistently working and delving into one thing was really fruitful and led to some really cool discoveries.” Working in only one process refined her skill and application, later adding bits of color into the black and white portraits through acrylic and acrylic gouache paints.

Able sets aside blocks of time in her schedule that are specifically dedicated to creating art. “Counterintuitively, I get the most inspiration from just sitting down and doing disciplined chunks of work. It’s actually just the sitting down and the starting… that’s when all of the creativity and the inspiration starts to come through.” While she was working on her degrees, Able mainly looked for inspiration in her head. “I was thinking too hard, without sitting down and figuring out what I actually liked to do and wanted to do for really long stretches of time. That’s really where the magic happens— when you have this thing you can do for 80 hours and still want to keep going with it.” With one 10”x10” animal portrait taking up to a full week’s work and colored elements adding days of time after that, the dedication Able has to her craft shows in the delicate details of each piece.

In her recent works, Able has focused on Montana’s flora and fauna— she goes out and finds acorns that turn into a cap for a mouse, berry brambles become an ornamental ruff, leaves and wildflowers transform into tail feathers. “Being from the East Coast and then having moved West is a really big source of inspiration in these kinds of not-always-so-obvious ways. A lot of the pieces I’ve been doing recently— bighorn sheep, bison, elk, and deer— they are portraits of them, but their antlers have carved designs in them. I don’t know where they came from, but for me they kind of invoke hunting culture with a [mount] on the wall.” Coming from the East Coast, Able wasn’t familiar with the frequency of taxidermy as home art as we see it in Montana. “I think of them as live animals while I’m drawing them, but I like the way they elude to the [culture] I don’t fully understand and the friends and people I know whose identity is built around that [in Montana].”

Featured at Altitude Gallery in Bozeman and Radius Gallery in Missoula, Able’s animal portraits appear to come off the wall with tufts of life-like fur. “I have a white clay panel that I coat with black ink, then I use a variety of sharp tools— tattoo needles are the tool I use most often and X-Acto knives to make marks on it— so I remove the black to leave the white behind. It’s a very magical process, because at first you just have this void that you are illuminating, and it feels like you are adding light as you are working.”

In breaking the mold of traditional Western art in the names of Charlie Russell, Able sees the foundations of Western art full of “problematic narratives of manifest destiny and what Westerners did to the Native Americans. In my work, I think I’m questioning a lot of the mythologies that traditional art doesn’t question. It promotes that mythology, rather than questions it in many instances.” Modestly, Able notes: “I hope there are glimmers of that in my work.”

*Vulpes Vulpes. Scratchboard & acrylic gouache.*

For Able, that’s the crucial thing about art: it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece, it doesn’t have to always be your best work. You just have to create, to sit down and not worry about constantly outdoing yourself. Art can be anything by anyone for anyone. But, the difficult thing— the important thing— is to create.

Furiously. Wonderfully. Wildly.