ArtistsNetwork.com 59balancing a bold, intuitive approach
with careful attention to composition,
tone, and pleasing color relationships.
“Lose your tone, and you lose every-
thing,” he cautions. Knight is more
concerned with convincing color rela-
tionships than with accurate color. To
that end, he’ll push the atmospheric
perspective, bluing the distant hills,
or increase the contrast between the
bank and water. Again, by painting a
scene multiple times, he’s freed from
the constraint of matching the land-
scape tone-for-tone, color-for-color.
Once Knight has established the
block-in, he’ll alternate between
brushes, a palette knife and a large
paint scraper, building up paint and
scraping it back, juxtaposing thin and
thick paint, teasing in a few edges todefine the planes. Knight doesn’t
so much describe form as evoke it,
deftly treading the line between
naturalism and abstraction. “Happy
accidents seem to occur when the
paint is flowing freely and the brain is
thinking laterally,” he says. Or, as
Cézanne once said, “Painting from
nature is not copying the object; it
is realizing one’s sensations.”
Sometimes an overload of sensa-
tions—a confusing tangle of trees
along the far bank of a waterhole,
ever-changing light or even midday
heat—can overwhelm and distract an
artist. One of the challenges to paint-
ing outside, Knight explains, is not to
be “overly influenced by motif. It’s not
what you look at that’s important, but
what you see. I try to use the subjectOOne Scene, Four Tools
Try this: Do four 10x12-inch paintings of the same scene, allowing
yourself no more than 20 minutes for each. Use a fan brush for
one, a palette knife for another, a square brush for the third
and a round brush for the fourth. Each tool facilitates its own
mark-making, and by experimenting with them, you’re developing
your own artistic language, much like stringing together words
in a poem. Consider how you want to express those “words,”
or marks, and embrace them. —Ken KnightWhile an extended painting session
might last anywhere from four to six
hours, he spends from 40 minutes
to no more than two hours on any
individual painting. “I only put a paint-
ing back in my four-wheel drive when
I don’t know what else to do to make
it any better,” he says. “Then, when I
take it back to the studio for revision,
it frees me up from that immediate
contact with nature.” With some dis-
tance from the subject, he can appraise
each painting based on its own merits.
WATCH THE TONE
Knight masses in large blocks of
turpentine-thinned color with a fan
brush or a 1-inch house brush, quickly
establishing the major shapes and