Katherine Cox Knapp
Chicago, Ilinois
A Chicago based painter playing with color and texture and leaning more toward realism or abstraction depending on the unique character of each piece.
Message
Katherine Cox Knapp is a painter living and working in Chicago, Il. Her work comes from her own life, photographs, and imagination, and focuses on intimacy, vulnerability, and beauty. Harkening back to the 19th Century movement, "Art for Art's Sake," she is interested in the direct aesthetic experience of a piece of art-that moment of interchange between a viewer and an art object being viewed. She calls this, Experience for Experience's Sake.
Her work has been exhibited in numerous Chicago venues including the Chicago Cultural Center, the Bridgeport Art Center, the Epiphany Center for the Arts, Zhou B Art Center, The Evanston Art Center, and the West Loop Contemporary Fine Art Expo.
Statement
Experience for Experience's Sake
I grew up an isolated child in a hilly tree-lined neighborhood in Pittsburgh during the steel mill era. The fluctuating visual tapestry that is our waking world was often my sole source of entertainment and companionship. My paintings are still shots from that tapestry, past and present, internal and external, filtered through a lifetime of love, loss, struggle, and success. As such, my work has a voyeuristic feel, as if the viewer is eavesdropping or lingering nearby unnoticed, full of love and longing, but never really a part of things. This creates a feeling of nostalgia, not for the past, but for what is happening right in front of you.
I often paint nature and animals, the most beautiful parts of the world, but ones that exist in their own parallel realm to humans. (I’m particularly drawn to roosters, who are loners, but showy and proud in their isolation.) I also paint people, the source of both our greatest joy and despair in life. My portraits often have their eyes averted, focused on whatever they’re doing, not seeing whoever is watching nearby.
I start with a loose gestural drawing in charcoal, acrylic, or oil and I work out the colors and composition on the canvas. Studies would probably save me time, but I fear they will drain some of the energy from the final work: like to see and feel the struggle on the canvas.
In the private unselfconscious moments of my images, I offer the viewer the direct aesthetic experience of a person and an art object being viewed. What I want is to both connect with the world and offer the world its own private connection with the art.