Katherine Cox Knapp

Bio

Katherine Cox Knapp is a figurative painter living and working in Chicago, Il. She works from her own life and photographs 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. 

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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.

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Artist Statement

Experience for Experience's Sake

 

Through my work I seek to share my intense visual experience of the physical world. I grew up a much neglected child in a hilly tree-lined neighborhood in Pittsburgh during the steel mill era. Watching the ever 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. 

My paintings 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-I like to see the struggle on the canvas. I finish with several layers of increasingly transparent oil paint to achieve the color and luminosity that oil paint uniquely provides. 

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.