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Photo Sue Harrison
Fine Arts Work Center fellow John Knight sets his sights on chronicling weeds to express beauty and strength in unexpected places.
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Slipping through the cracks
Knight focuses on weeds to illustrate the tenacity of nature
Sue Harrison
BANNER STAFF
At first glance, John Knight’s paintings are an unusual juxtaposition of stark, sometimes harsh backgrounds paired with a single vigorous, tall weed in bloom. A closer look reveals more.
In his paintings, the beauty of the often overlooked plant’s form and colors and the almost cathedral framing each receives from the surrounding landscape give the lowly weed a new stature and meaning.
"I wouldn’t have expected to end up painting weeds," Knight says, standing in his second floor studio at the Fine Arts Work Center, where he is a visual arts fellow. "But you see them everywhere, in parking lots and in fields, plants like dandelions and thistle. They are not part of a conscious landscape planted in neat rows, and the human presence is not as obvious."
In the weeds, Knight found a way to give voice to a variety of seemingly unrelated subjects like the decentralizing of American cities, the lopsided dependence on the automobile and even the seeking of the sublime in the mundane.
An exhibition of Knight’s paintings will be held in the Hudson Walker Gallery at FAWC, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown, beginning with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. this Friday and hanging through March 2.
Knight took a roundabout route from his birthplace in South Bend, Ind. to his current fellowship at the Work Center. After college he moved to Silver City, New Mexico for a year and a half where he could walk from his apartment into the Gila National Forest. He painted the rock formations and century plants that dotted the spare terrain.
He then made an abrupt change of venue and went to Washington, D.C. to attend grad school (he also met his wife there). He went from the sere tones and spare vegetation of the Southwest to the congestion and pace of urban life, which led him to do more studio work and less outdoor painting.
"I did find some big communal gardens," he says. "They were overgrown, it was summer. I started taking the forms of flowers and vines [found there] and using them as [abstract] shapes to make compositions."
After hearing a Washington roommate talk about Portland, Maine, Knight and his new wife moved north.
"It’s on a peninsula and you can walk around since it was built before the car culture completely took over," he says of his home in Portland.
Knight likes being able get out and walk around, to interact with his world in small, intimate, daily ways. The car, although convenient, compartmentalizes life in alienating ways, he says.
"When I walk I run into people I didn’t expect to," he says. "I see flyers and learn about things going on. I pass a protest and stop to see what it’s about. If I were in my car I would drive right past."
Walking also keeps him close to nature, and he has continued to paint landscapes using rocks, clouds, hay rolls and trees as shape and color elements. He then discovered the strength and diversity of weeds.
"I always wanted a subject, something to focus on, something to look closely at," he says. "About three or four years ago I began to focus on common plants."
When he came to the Cape for his residency, he assumed he would be painting outdoors but says the landscape is so different and minimal that he has concentrated on studio work.
He uses photos of landscapes and specific weeds — most shot in Maine — as a starting point. He makes quick sketches, paints smaller versions and then switches to a large canvas for his final version.
"It helps to be away from Maine and paint it," he says. "It’s easier to think about the memory and the image."
He renders a realistic painting of the weeds and uses an imaginary landscape to frame it. There are meadows with hay rolls in the background of some and big tumbles of rocks with a peek at the Maine shoreline in others. The clouds often take on a density that rivals the rocks and are sometimes used to almost halo the flowering portion of the plant.
"I started framing the seed heads off with a single cloud," he says. "That central placement looks a little religious." He says he is not a religious man but that he does have a sense sometimes of having created an image with a cathedral feeling, which he describes as "a little reverent or mysterious."
The vibrant thistles and pile worts, chickorys and dandelions represent more than meets the eye.
"They grow pretty tall, and the fact that they grow in places where you wouldn’t expect them to survive, standing tall and independent, it’s hard not to see them as some sort of symbol."
The viewer gets the sense of tenacity and of unprogrammed beauty in unplanned places, a sort of nod to the wisdom of nature and of man’s inability to suppress that. Is there personal symbolism for Knight? Maybe, he says.
"I don’t have a lot of self confidence, maybe it’s a way of depicting my potential," he says. "They are like portraits, tall like me. I’m sort of shy, maybe that’s why I paint a picture of a plant that is strong-rooted and reaching for something higher."
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Provincetown Banner News
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Mar 11th, 2010