Contributed by Sharon Butler / This month, Two Coats of Paint welcomes Vermont artist Sage Tucker-Ketcham. Sage’s recent nature-based work operates in the space between observation, memory, and imagination. Each painting begins with something she saw on a walk or caught in her peripheral vision from a car window – moments that lodge into her consciousness, like seeds waiting to germinate.
Back in the studio, working from memory, Tucker-Ketcham employs a delightfully anarchic process. She sprays, pours, drips, and presses cotton sheets onto canvas, essentially creating monotypes that serve as the underpaintings for her images. She works on tables and floors, moving quickly and intuitively around her canvases until the moment arrives to slow down, take a look at the work in a vertical position, and begin defining the nascent image with traditional oils and glazing techniques.
What materialize are bold, stylized blooms rendered in rich blues, warm reds, and golden yellows that seem to have an inner light. Tucker-Ketcham favors pattern and ornament over naturalistic representation, transforming poppies, eucalyptuses, black-eyed Susans, and daisies into something emblematic rather than botanical, surrounded by swirling vines and leaves that remind me of medieval tapestries – for instance, the famous Unicorn Tapestry at the Metropolitan Museum.
The aesthetic DNA of Sage’s work runs through multiple lineages: the decorative arts of the late nineteenth century, European folk-art traditions, and the contemporary return to landscape painting inspired by our collective flight from urban centers during the COVID pandemic. Like Kehinde Wiley by way of his bold appropriation of decorative botanicals in his figure paintings, Tucker-Ketcham understands that flowers are never merely decorative; they carry cultural weight and history itself.
Like Maine painter Gail Spaen, Tucker-Ketcham honors the bold simplicity and symbolic richness of folk art while adapting its visual vocabulary to contemporary sensibilities. For Tucker-Ketcham, nostalgia, though perhaps a temporary salve, is not enough to fulfill the current search for beauty and order in a dangerously fragmented world. Alice Dodge got at this overall sense of persistent instability when she noted in Seven Days that, notwithstanding pastoral content, “there are no refuges” in Tucker-Ketcham’s work and that her paintings “invite the viewer into a jungle where there is gravity but no ground.”
Hermann Hesse captured something essential about the relationship between art and folk tradition in Narcissus and Goldmund when he wrote of Goldmund’s artistic awakening: “Art was not just a craft to him, but a way of grasping the eternal in the temporal.” Tucker-Ketcham’s paintings gracefully embody this philosophy.
About the artist: Sage Tucker-Ketcham (b. 1978, Randolph, Vermont) has a BFA in Painting from Maine College of Art & Design and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her paintings are included in numerous private collections internationally and abroad, and in several corporate collections, including those of Northfield Savings Bank, Vermont Community Foundation, National Life Group, The Hinds Loft, Delta Airlines, Roundstone International, among others. Tucker-Ketcham’s work has been noted in the Boston Globe, the Burlington Free Press, the New York Times, Art New England, Art Scope, and Seven Days. She is an adjunct professor of drawing and painting at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, and co-founder and co-director of ATM GALLERY in Shelburne, VT. She shows widely in New England.
Sage Tucker-Ketcham, Two Coats of Paint Artist Residency, 22-19 41st Avenue, 6th Floor, Studio #10, Long Island City, NY. July 20-25, 2025. Please join us for an Open Studio on Thursday, July 24, 2 – 5 pm. For more information, or to arrange a studio visit, please contact: STAFF@twocoatsofpaint.com. Please put SAGE TUCKER-KETCHAM in the subject line. Follow her on Instagram @sagetuckerketcham
Studio listening: “When I start a painting, I listen to mixtape that a friend made for me 20 years ago or Spotify Indi pop 2010s mix, then move to more mellow speed with TV shows or British murder mysteries. I will add color theory, art historical books, and art theory books to the mix.” Sage Tucker-Ketcham’s Spotify Playlist
Upcoming shows or events
“A Collectors Vision,” The Bank Art Gallery, Newburgh, NY. Through August 3, 2025
“Edward Holland, Peter Wallis & Sage Tucker-Ketcham,” Chaffee Art Center, Rutland, VT.
July 25–September 5, 2025
About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint. She is looking forward to mentoring a cohort of ten artists in the Canopy Program next year. Deadline to apply for a spot is July 27.
