Katherine Cox Knapp

Bio

Katherine Cox Knapp is a figurative oil painter living and working in Chicago, Il. She starts with a loose charcoal drawing and brightly colored base coat followed by 4-5 layers of increasingly transparent oil paint. Throughout the process she uses palette knives, steel brushes, and anything else she can find lying about to create texture and depth. Her work is inspired by images, mostly her own photographs, and the final composition is worked out on the canvas while painting. She leans more towards realism or abstraction depending on the unique character of each piece.

     She is mostly self taught with a few classes at a small studio in Chicago and at one of the new online art schools.

     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, and the West Loop Contemporary Fine Art Expo.

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Statement

Experience for Experience's Sake
In my work, I am concerned with the direct aesthetic experience of a piece of art.
​     In our age where social media has dropped a veil of self consciousness over our lives, I believe an intense personal engagement with art is all the more vital. With the constant presence of cameras in our pockets and social media beckoning for posts, we are too often watching our lives from the outside, sifting through our days for cropped, curated, “instagramable” moments. Distracted by our anticipation of other people’s reaction to what we are seeing and doing, we reduce our ability to personally experience the world ourselves.
​     I invite the viewer into the private unselfconscious moments of the images in my paintings hoping to give them their own private unfiltered experience of a viewer and an art object being viewed.