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Photos Reva Blau
R.G. Knudsen dances when he plays guitar and before he gets ready to paint. Once he starts spinning around on a toe, there is no saying how many revolutions he will make. |
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The enigmatic R.G. Knudsen and the Zen of abstract painting
Before R.G. Knudsen paints, he dances to Elvis Costello or Mozart and gets worked up into what he calls a passionate frenzy. From there he launches into the creation of his polychromatic, abstract canvases.
His work will cover the walls at the Poli Gallery, 389 Commercial St., with an opening from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday, June 22, and will remain on display throughout the summer.
Knudsen, whose only training is a few classes at Castle Hill, insists that he does not think about what he does. Even when he feels he has discovered a new way to create depth without perspective, he purposefully forgets the technique so as not to feel that he is playing the same hand. Instead, he just gets out of his own way, to channel painting’s own primitive energy.
Looking at his paintings, one wants to believe that he goes about it with insouciance, as if he just jumped on the bucking bronco of pure abstract painting and could stay on
None of his paintings, it is true, depends upon subject matter, clear forms, centers, outlines or blocks of color. “Summer Branches,” for example, is a dense thicket of chartreuse, created by green and yellow acrylic paint daringly defying the surface of the canvas in a thick layer of impasto much like the impenetrable undergrowth of a forest.
When asked about process, Knudsen, a self-professed storyteller, instead tells stories of late ’70s road trips, the R&B bands he has fronted over the years, a Hatfield-McCoy type feud in Tennessee where he owns nine acres near Clinch Mountain. His paintings, he is telling us, evoke a quintessentially American spirit because they seem to have come from the wide, open space of the West.
Knudsen was born in Nevada and his father was a Navy diver in Lake Meade. Knudsen was born while his father was diving. He tells the story of how his mother radioed his father to tell him that she had gone into labor. The radioed messages kept interrupting daytime radio, to which in the late ’40s everyone listened. One senses that he has kept alive this connection to the depths of the ocean by making paintings that have no center. Like a deep-sea diver, Knudsen’s work is all about defying gravity.
Knudsen is private when it comes to his actual process, mostly because he believes that since the art is about untamed wildness, talking about technique is, indeed, a buzz kill. Knudsen wants to get back to the pure vision of abstract work: how the paintings erase the distance between beauty and the eye of the beholder. In order to do this, Knudsen needs to pretend he has no process. He simply made the tiger appear with a magic wand.
Knudsen came to Provincetown to play music in 1971 when he was in his early 20s. He co-owned Café Edwige, which was a jazz club then. He played in many bands, including the band that he fronted, The Shifters, which toured throughout the country in the ’80s.
He started painting to relax from playing the guitar. At first, he painted straight out of tubes of watercolors. He put a vase of flowers in front of him and painted the stem, the petals. He was amazed that with a stroke of white, the vase would jump out at him in three dimensions.
In 1986, he had painted over a green landscape. Suddenly, he felt an urge to grab a kitchen knife with which he started stabbing the canvas. The green of the under-painting spilled out from the yellows and oranges of the top painting to signify autumn foliage in a direct, immediate way. He sees this as an almost mystical epiphany that led him to abstraction.
A year later, he switched to the acrylics that dried more quickly, allowing him to increase his chances that he would replicate such a moment. “Oils leave you too long to be dissatisfied,” he says. He likes the immediacy of acrylics, the way they come back at you with your intention.
Knudsen uses slashes, smears, drips, pours, scrapes and practiced knife marks. Yet he insists repeatedly that there is no process, almost splattering the phrase as someone would who painted with the canvas on the floor. “I just want a thing of beauty,” he said. “If it doesn’t happen the first time, it’ll happen the second. Beauty just comes at you. It just leaps out and grabs you.”
In each canvas, colors like turquoise, rust, cerulean blue, neon red, juxtapose one another. Like the fur of a wild big cat, the repeated patterns in certain colors never bore the eye. In “Jamaican Flower,” Knudsen seems to have poured paint the color of a glacial lake into pure, reflective pools. Over these, red and yellow paints tangle together and admix, revealing the twisting, joyous scrape of a palette knife.
While he will not say that he has control over what he does, he confesses that he has a joyous focus when he paints and hints at the long hours. “The way I paint, it’s called wood-shedding,” which he defines as “putting yourself in a situation in which you don’t have anything to do but play guitar.”
While all the stories he tells have a stranger-than-fiction truth, it is good to remember that he is also a musical lyricist. The stories are as rich in poetic detail as the Wild West itself.
Knudsen often refers back to the historical moment in 1839 when the invention of the camera liberated painting from its representational function and allowed painting to be abstract. The myth that Knudsen embraces, of course, is that abstraction is the volcanic eruption in paint of stored-up energy. Just as in a blues solo, to which Knudsen often compares painting, the free form improvisation in paint that Knudsen accomplishes is the result of discipline and mastery. “I never went to school for painting; I don’t know painting technique; I don’t know painters; I don’t know the history of art; I don’t know anything.”
Clearly, he is pulling our legs. Knudsen might not have learned about the chemistry of acrylics in lecture form, but he must have spent years of concentrated labor and experiment in the studio. Nonetheless, the paintings force the viewer to take him at his word. Even while the painting only pretends to be easy, what they are about is the tourettic grunt, the loud ah ha of sudden epiphany, the moment when you plug your guitar into the amp and let go.
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Jun 21st, 2007