A Conversation with Kent Knowles, 2023
John Lee Matney: Welcome Kent. Can you discuss works by Savannah College of Art and Design professors in Works on Paper?
Kent Knowles: So the works you're seeing is photography by Sandra-Lee Phipps You also see some of my work. And then we have two printmakers. One is the primary faculty member for our printmaking program, Robert Brown and the second is our Dean of Academics, Dale Clifford who's also a printmaker. There's a lot of methodology and different processes. Professor Robert Brown is working with photogravure, which is a fascinating medium, and I've never worked with it personally. But in a nutshell, you can get photographic reproductions printed on a plate that you can then physically manipulate however you want. So if you view his collection of work, you see this lovely marriage of nature and embellishment. and of course, that goes with color but also with details within the work itself. So you get a wide range of potential when you're dealing with imagery that we're used to seeing as photographic and as an accurate record. And then it's getting manipulated. With Dale Clifford's work, you're getting a glimpse into a very long-running dialogue of the artist utilizing woodcut, linocut woodblock to create these, these narratives based around a lot of birds, a lot of animal life a lot of rabbits, and I believe you all have work that is, are primarily birds and, and maybe ravens or crows, as I recall.
Under Julien, 2022
Photo-gravure and etching
23 × 20 in | 58.4 × 50.8 cm
Frame included
Edition of 10
it's interesting. I've known Dale for a while, and I look at his work and start to see narratives that might be metaphors for other things. And it's always fun because he always has beautiful titles, and I view his work and I try to figure out if I know what this is about and what's going on, not that I could claim to be privy to his life, but you know, when you work with somebody for a long time you begin to imagine what these animals might symbolize. There's a nice parallel between human behavior and animal behavior. And you'll see a lot of that in his work and I'm sure it's reflective in some way of the times that he's living in. I've always viewed them as a record of human relationships.
Dale Clifford
Matney Gallery: Discuss your drawings in the exhibition
Kent Knowles: So it's strange, and I've always had this relationship with my work. There are these figures that are created out of nothing. They're just drawings that start from scratch without any agenda, but they start taking on these personalities. It's odd because we see an image of a figure and say, oh, that must be, or that represents such and such..or that is the type of person. And in many ways, they are. It has become more pronounced with parenthood, but you're literally bringing this thing to life, and something didn't exist there before. You have this strange kind of parallel between parenting and bringing these images into the world that may look like somebody or a combination of somebody's, but I think as we get more populated, the odds of these imagined drawings, these people resembling actual people, is kind of a strange , an odd channel to go down. So none of those people exist as far as I know. But one strange aspect is the piece named Jane; I ended up calling my daughter Jane, but this drawing predates her, or it was when she was an infant. So I don't know if that's a projection of what she will look like or what that means, but it's always a mystery.
Matney Gallery: Comment on the painting Future which we exhibited in Three Excellences of Culture, Art Rosenbaum and Friends
There's something strange about, and it's a term I like to talk about a lot, especially with the students, It is perceptual vigilance, where you find what you're looking for. Because this happens sometimes, people will send me pictures of them standing in front of a painting, and they'll be making the same face, or there'll be some strange commonality. And that painting was kind of like that. They're like projections of what might happen. So my son, who at the time was like eight, eight or nine, posed for me, but not necessarily for the features in the face, just to get the kind of shirt right. And he was a great model, but I remember thinking, Hey, I wonder if he's gonna end up growing up to look like this. So I think it's at the forefront of every parent's mind or anybody that has loved any creature whether it's an animal or a parent or whomever, but you think about how fast life goes and you think about, what is their life gonna look like when you're no longer part of it. And so, for that piece, the flowers aren't a coincidence. You have these things that change, and they bloom and grow, and inevitably they will wither and go away. So, in essence, that painting is about enjoying parenthood at the moment and trying not to be too clouded by what could happen. Because I've never known fear like I know it as a parent. It come up, especially on those sleepless nights, the most involved complex, horrible scenarios of what could happen to my kids.And it's not an excellent way to spend the night or try and fall back asleep because the adrenaline gets going. So it is, in essence, that painting is about that stuff.
Matney Gallery: Can you elaborate about the flowers as a motif?
Yeah. I wish I had an excellent answer for that. I was trying out a technique I hadn't really employed before. So a lot of it was purely technical. I just wanted to see how it would look. Flowers have a long history, their place in Art. And they've meant different things at different times. But there's something about an acknowledgment of a painting it's not real, but then you see what the artist is doing to connect it to the real world. And flowers are no different. They're fragrant, right? In-person. They're three dimensional. You can walk around them, you arrange them they start to fall apart, you know? But with a painting, you know, the floral motifs are highly decorative and have been for centuries.And so there is this moment where you ask are they actual flowers? Are they just a print? But technically speaking, I was trying out a technique where you create these luminous colors on a white background, and then you cut in with black paint. So you get a very stark contrast. And what that does is not only enhances the shape of the flower, but it also makes them appear more luminous because they're not necessarily reacting to an environment. They're as high contrast as possible. So it was really intriguing to see where that paint application would go. And I like it, but it's a tester. I've only done a few other paintings that way, and they've got a lot of expressive potential. So that's something a lot of people don't understand when they're looking at artwork, is that there can be multiple agendas that the artist is engaging all in one painting. It's not just a single like this painting is about this or that. It's like multiple things are happening, some are glamorous, and some are just, you know, duct taped behind the scenes, production. It is interesting how some art historians don't want to pay attention to that aspect. I remember a great story. It was when I was at UGA and I won't name names, but I was in a contemporary art history class, and the teacher was excellent. He had all these great anecdotes, and the instructor talked about how you have an art historian and a dead artist, and the artist's widow.. The art historian was theorizing all these strange hypotheses about what the artist was doing. And the widow was one by one discounting them. Like, no, he wasn't obsessed with fire. He just had an extra tube of yellow.. And the art historian walked away, not considering her input because he was discounting it. After all, he liked his version better. So it was like, well what's going on? If that's happening in the first iteration, the first generation of the report, God knows what's gonna happen three decades from now when people are quoting that. It reminds me of the the film The Last Temptation of Christ there's this moment where God, the actor, just recently died. Anyway, an actor is playing Paul, formerly Saul, and he meets Jesus, and Jesus says, you know, you got it all wrong.l. And the guy's like, well, I'm glad I met you because now I can forget it. Now I can forget that I ever met you. Art and art history have a strange way of living well beyond the artist's intention, which might be what brings people to the party.
John Lee Matney; I really appreciated the talk you did for Art Rosenbaum. It was really intense sort of thing,
Kent Knowles; Well, you know what, I think this is important. Nowadays, we all have so much going on, it's just like a constant hustle. Just connecting with you on this Zoom, answering emails, walking the dogs, and talking to you all at the same time, It’s just one ball of activity, and it seems like it's going on all the time. So in all that mess, sometimes, even though we have all these communication channels, we forget to state the obvious. We fail to, tell people how we feel about them. But to be able to express things without shame or without trepidation and to say to people, it's huge, right? And I don't mean to get too corny, but it was an excellent opportunity to see that he was participating in that interview, which I didn't know until later, although I should have known. Because you take that opportunity only sometimes, although it's always there. You sometimes exercise it. And I remember my brother and I are into screenwriting, and there's this guy that wrote this great book on screenwriting, and he would have contests and things like that, and he had a very open forum online, and you could just email him questions. And I remember I reached out to him one night, and I said, Hey, you know, I think you're doing a great job. People love your book. They love the structure that you offer. And, he died two weeks later. And I always felt a weird kind of selfish sense of pride that I took the time to let that guy know because, you know, he probably gets that all day long. But, you know, here you have this thing you take for granted. You're like, oh, well, ill, I'll get to it. And I'm sure they know, but, not to sound like a bleeding heart, it's important to let people know those things before it's too late.
I just posted something about Rakestraw’s Dream. I published a clip where you are talking about it but Art speaks about that painting in a different interview and he's saying that that's the only picture where he has two of the same person in the picture. Rakestraw’s is in the foreground and he's also in the background. That's one of the only times he ever did that besides his self-portraits.
Kent Knowles:What's funny is how artists have all these little rules for themselves and they don't articulate them. I can speak for myself. I hold certain rules in my head, and then I'll have one day when I feel brave enough to challenge one of 'em. It’s wild because, nobody else knows that you have that, and nobody really cares. But you, for some reason, pile all this pressure, your personal aesthetic, and the parameters you’ve created for yourself. And it's hilarious that artists are almost as creative in inventing those as they are in creating their own work. You know, they'll create as many problems for themselves, I think as they, as they create opportunities.
Kent Knowles
John Lee Matney: I remember the peice that went to France, The one with the girl with a double image. It's two faces. I just remembered that piece. Do you know if that's probably the only one you did like that?
Kent Knowles:I did one called, I called it Ghost, where you had like this second figure kind of, it almost looked like a rough carbon copy of the exact figure and that, years ago.
John Lee Matney: Art Rosebaum’s Self Portrait with Camera comes to mind which has various poses rather than mirror image duplicates. Can you comment on explorations into self identity in his work and in own work?
I know that Rosenbaum was always great at engaging people. It's almost like he had an appetite for it. He wanted to be around as many people as possible and get an idea of what they were about. But I would think with all of that investigation and all of that kind of gregarious behavior, I don't think you can engage that way without turning it on yourself a little bit. And, when I see that painting, I think about somebody actively acknowledging their many selves. And we have in a painted form where you have this sense of that's me, but then that's also me. For the longest time, I entertained a couple of different personalities in my mind, and I don't mean they were all active here. I would have; there was like a cowboy version of me somewhere in Wyoming. And then there was a more simple version of me living in Okinawa, you know, and, and it was, it was comforting. Every now and then, I would have these quiet moments where I could almost feel myself in those other places.
John Lee Matney: Comment on the photography of Sandra-Lee Phipps and photography program at SCAD
You need to believe in something, from Lessons in Survival series, Vanessa, 2019
Archival pigment print
34 1/2 × 46 in | 87.6 × 116.8 cm
Frame included
Edition of 5
Kent Knowles:. So our photography department's really strong. I can speak to the one at the Atlanta location. What is interesting about photography is it spans from the most cutting edgeechnology and practice to pinhole cameras and everything in between. We have an alternative processes room. We have anything you want. And so when you see artists coming out of there, students, grad students, there's no specific formula or technique. It's just a wide-open field. And so, Sandra, of course, is a part of that dialogue. And, anytime you have more than one faculty in a department, you have the opportunity for multiple voices and areas of specialization. And her voice has always been very documentary, but also it's nothing hidden. Like it's, it's in your face. It's straightforward. And sometimes people don't know how to handle that, you know? Cause photography has its own connection to reality. And so if you're showing people what's going on, they can no longer ignore it. That's what I get from her work: it is a revelation. It shows you, and it challenges you in that way.
John Lee Matney: Do you have anything else to add? The gallery appreciates your contribution to Works on Paper
Kent Knowles: Well, I love these group shows because you see things align and coalesce in ways that you weren't really aware of. And when we saw images of work as they were all collected and displayed, and you mentioned this, you started to see interesting parallels and connections. I've got four different people from the same institution, four, four SCAD faculty or administrators showing work. And you start to see, hey, there may be a connection here and then on a global level. You've got all these people making stuff right now, and then you get to put it all in one spot and start to see how those things come together
