Kathryn Scanlan

Looking at Landscape

It’s like when you’re looking at a landscape, and—

How the clouds just start to come together, like one big—

You know, I was driving once through the mountains, and a snowstorm was coming up behind—

It was coming down over—

It was chasing me out—

Well, I had to pull over, so I pulled over and started pulling everything out of—

Because the back of the car was filled up so I couldn’t see, I couldn’t look back and—

It was really beautiful and also terrifying like—

I pulled everything out and piled it on the road and pulled out my brushes and started, you know, painting the, the—


I’ve realized something, I’ve realized that—

I’ve thought about it a long time and nobody understands how to look at—

Nobody understands—

It’s like the time I was having coffee with my ex and we were trying, we were trying to talk about what happened, what was the root—

There’s always that root—

But it’s so hard to—

It’s really very difficult to see—

You see, when I was a kid, I would lie in the grass all day and—

I would just lie there and—

The bugs would crawl on me, and the snakes, but it didn’t matter because—

Back then my mother, she would look at me and say—

Sometimes she would just look at me like she’d never seen—

It was like she had never seen anything—

Have you ever seen—

Have you ever—

What I mean is, have you ever been outside walking by yourself and thought—

Have you ever thought about—

Have you ever thought—

Have you looked at the sky and wondered—

Have you looked—

Have you—

Looked—

Kathryn Scanlan's work has appeared in NOON, No Posit, MAKE, and Newcity, and she is the recent recipient of a fellowship & residency at the Vermont Studio Center. She is the current nonfiction editor of MAKE, and co-director of Old Gold Exhibitions & Events, a collaborative project space in Chicago. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.