Spencer Nitkey
Stigmata Pentaptych
Stigmata no. 1 (Right Hand), 2005
Acrylic On burlap
“I have longed looked at appendages, in particular, hands, as cartographic instruments,” says the artist, “because it is through hands that bodies come to know the topography of the other, and this has never been more clear for me than in the running of fingers through damp hair, white and salt-scented from the sea, with new love cresting like a wave, white capped, at a time when hands are not yet inured to a body, when the map has not yet been taken in, memorized, when the land is new and the grass is hard beneath your boots, when the touching is also a fresh mapping of the toucher themselves, and, finally what brazen capacity for deracination there is in a heart newly flooded with love,” explaining the inspiration behind this piece. Look. We know better. The artist’s thick layers of oil paint, almost tendrils of mountains rise in red from a tan abstraction of background colors and arouse the finger-tip touch of real love. A touch the artist, if he was being honest with himself, would admit he had only ever once felt before when his sister wiped a salty tear from his cheek at their father’s funeral. A touch that is both a mapping and terraformation that came as he trembled under the earthquake of their father’s absent voice, under a shared fear of a man who had not learned how to love without bruising. They also shared an unspoken agreement to end the hemophilic love: he by not having children, she by loving with a careful precision, hands like a surgeon’s, trained, practiced, and rare. When she took those hands and knew him with them, knew by touching, him known by the touching. Knew the hatred of his father, the hatred of his own hatred, a hatred of a love that came through in subtle breaks, light through the interstices of blinds, life from the protoplasmic ocean, a ball tossed in the backyard, tackling a man with a knife in the grocery store to protect his son. Knew the tapes the artist had listened to in the newly empty apartment where his father had lived, alone, with empty white walls and only a few mystery novels and the checkered comforter. In the tapes, his father recounted marching through the Pacific and meeting death, and they made the artist cry and know his father better, and still did not help the artist forgive him, but instead filled him with a sadness that overflowed in the church, the light passing through the stained glass windows illuminating the hardwood floor in reds and blues and greens. All this his sister knew as she helped him wipe away a tear, and which is both reified and abstracted in this simple work of topographical acrylic.
#
Stigmata no. 2 (Left Hand), 2007
Oil and stencil on canvas.
In this painting the artist has arranged various, hand-painted blocks of color, nuanced meditations on various forms of red, with mathematical precision, creating an almost staircase like image of layered, rotating rectangles which intend to induce within the viewer a sensation of descent, designed to capture the interior experience of the artist’s remembering a moment of fatherly love surrounding his first fall from a training-wheel-free bike and the red-faced burning, eyes red and tearful, pain searing red up from the bend of his knee, and the slow mix of pride and anger as his father's hard hands reached down like they were from heaven and him feeling like he was small but also liking to be small but also ashamed of the desire to feel small, and the artist putting the head wet with tears he was trying to stymie up against the shoulder of his father who was wet with sweat and shirtless from mowing the lawn, who was tall and distant but sometimes loving in ways that surprised the artist, like right then as he held him and did not say anything about the tears and took him inside and poured peroxide over the wound and let the artist squeeze his arm tightly and did not scold the artist for letting out a small yelp like the dog when someone accidentally stepped on his tail as the peroxide sizzled and momentarily turned the asphalt speckled red of his bloody knee into a pink primordial ocean and then covered the clean wound with a bandage and a tenderness, like the red of a sky kissing the sun farewell, and the artist, more than almost anything, wishes that he could remember his father’s eyes on that day and see the love he knows must have leaked from them but cannot and instead only remembers the screams the two shared, the bright hot fire red, when the artist was trying drugs and the bodies of men for the first time, a remembering which produces a gentle, almost maroon sense of shame now when he thinks about it, and soon the memory falls out from under the artist, but of that day all he remembers are his father’s hands and the too often untapped potential for love the artist did not acknowledge until right then, lost in reds.
#
Stigmata no. 3 (Left Foot), 2006
Brass (patinated green), Glass, and Copper
Investigating the annealing properties of metallurgy and its philosophical connection to both art and love, the artist created this piece by exposing long stretches of brass, carefully sculpted and imprinted with the footsteps of his mother, to the elements, embedding them in the permafrost of Alaska for the extent of his mother’s chemotherapy treatments, and after two years that saw his mother wither under an encroaching mass of cells, multiplying without reason, out of control inside her, the healing poison slowly wilting her, like a rusting nail hammered into a tree (maybe the termites flee, but first the color falls from the leaves, dry and brown far too early, a microcosm of winter even in the burgeoning heat of the early summer, and then the color drains from the bark, almost imperceptible until it’s not, shedding its skin, the way a mother sheds her hair, first in clumps, then in a preemptive trimming) as she fought against the illness, until a double mastectomy ended it, an annihilative final strike, erasing the field of battle, victorious and weathered and alive, but not before the artist and his mother sat for hours, and discussed what she wanted from her death and funeral--the exact choral songs to be sung, the biblical passages equally old and new testaments to be read, the music that would bellow from the pipe organ, and the gentle melodies that would sing from the grand piano, the food at the reception afterwards calibrated to each guests tastes, her saying this was all so they could mourn, not plan, when she was gone, him sitting and learning about love as a slow, sometimes malignant presence that stings and twists and masses, that culminates in a gentle exchange of words and a deeper, more unspoken tenderness placed between the church pews where she wanted to be remembered, like her mother before her, a profound piece of art that makes permanent the transitory, almost bipedal, aspects of love.
#
Stigmata no. 4 (Right Foot) 2009
Glass, coal, earth, and blood.
In this lacerating installation which is both a prop for performance art and a sculpture in its own right, the viewer is asked to witness a literal trail of now cooled coals and glass over which the artist ran numerous times and consider the small flecks of still visible blood preserved on the larger, more obtrusive shards, as the work strives to capture, visualize, and, during its creation, realize the pain of discovering a sexuality that exists in the liminal space between boundaries, a sexuality which for the artist became tied to the act of walking during a 10-mile-a-day backpacking trip through the Sierra Nevada mountains where a steady pace and the overwhelming ambient silence that comes in the mountains, the trees rising up on both sides, slowly empties out the mind of its voice, each step chopping away like an ancient logger, at the internal monologue, as the slowly thinning air strips the mind of its embattlements, until there is the simple, raw and untouched self, exposed and wide-eyed at the universe stretched overhead, a self which is, he realizes, when he leaves his tent in the middle of the night, and cries under the stretched tarp of stars (more than he has ever seen, hundreds of them streaming across the sky luminous and momentary and fragile), essentially a stranger to him. A self that wants and loves in ways he has never really known. Pissing beneath the beauty, he realized that he was in love with his best friend, and despite this longing for the lithe and taut man he watched submerge himself in a lake each night, he still could want women too, and wanted both from this same strange center, and so, unleashed, this foreign thought leaked like the flooded banks of a river, while his blistered feet carried him for another two weeks, his want a second, heavier weight, that wrapped itself around him, and the back of his friend, his neck burned red and peeling in the sun, and his calves slicked with sweat and rhythmically tensing and relaxing as he walked, and the back of his arms as they pumped, and the rounded caps of his shoulders indented by the thick straps of his backpack, all heavy his want with specificity, and with each step over narrow dirt paths weaving their way, switchback up and down mountainsides, with each blistered heel rubbing minutely against the artist’s hiking book, he is close to giving up on it all, but instead he keeps it stymied and tries to ignore the swell of forest fire when their hands touch unfolding the thin aluminum windshield so they can light their stove, or when they laugh passing a bottle of cheap vodka between them and his lips linger on its rim, or when they sleep, two mummies, side by side, until one day they are back in the parking lot and their girlfriends are waiting for both of them with fast food, kisses, and complaints over their smells, and the artist, only 18, remembers what there is to love about women, and that two things can be true, and that perhaps his heart is big enough to hold two loves inside it, and as he drives home, the car jumping for twenty minutes over back roads then gliding for four hours over freeway, he thinks that maybe he can howl to both the moon and the sun, both Artemis and Apollo, and that no body is too small for its wanting despite the pain it takes to walk into acceptance, which is symbolized and immortalized by this aesthetic reflection on the paths we take to realization, and the bodily threats our desires can manifest.
#
Stigmata no. 5 (Heart), 1998
Oil on Canvas
Looking at first, a viewer’s eyes see only broad swaths of color, suggesting, one can imagine one thinking, something vaguely heartlike, but as the gaze is prolonged, either by innate interest and trust in the artist, or through a sense of obligation, having bought expensive tickets to this museum, the image transforms in, at first, a visual manner (the colors slowly delineate from one another, and the gaze is rewarded by a slow, cumulative enriching), until suddenly, like a door slamming open, shuddering the tan painted stucco ceiling of your childhood home, there is a well of feeling within you, and you are remembering loving yourself, and the shape of your footprint in the sand on the dark beach on New Year’s Eve when you stood alone, just inches from the ocean’s reaching, taking, in slow, measured breaths, a moment for yourself, pausing, with nothing but the sounds of faraway fireworks like wrinkling paper, and a moon low and ripe in the sky, the cold crawling up your legs as the waves touch your toes, the stars strung up over the ocean, vague and opalescent against the sky, and you there, with your neck back, extending and breathing, taking in this beauty for yourself, all this for you, and the moonlight and the sound of waves and the fireworks all congealing to your skin, and the slow dancing of your heart inside your chest, and for one moment, all this is yours and yours alone, and your skin, hairs raised from your shins to your arms, your whole body like a cactus, or a choir singing a hymnal, like thousands of goodnight kisses, and swollen, sprained ankles, and dissonant singing against the porcelain of your bathroom, and rain clouds slowly ruining your home’s new paint, and the ice of January, and meteoroid showers, and the cattle outside your car window, and the broom in the closet you never use, is all yours, and you love yourself for it, until time pulls you out of this moment and you are once against staring at an unfurling array of colors, beautiful and representative of the artist’s early oeuvre, before taking a more sculptural and conceptual style later in his career.
Spencer Nitkey is a writer living in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared in Apex Magazine, Fusion Fragment, Apparition Lit, Cosmorama, manywor(l)ds, and more. You can find more about him and read more of his writing on his website, spencernitkey.com
