When local artist Joseph Knowles left his career in architecture in the 1980s to focus solely on his art, he plunged head first into abstract gestural work. But as time went by, he explored other ideas, retaining his style yet exploring the natural work in a starkly expressive way.
An exhibition of work spanning Knowles’ career is on view at the Elverhoj Museum of History and Art, and displays the subtle shift in the character of the artwork, explained the Elverhoj’s Gallery Director Esther Bates. Titled The Evolving Perspective, the exhibit includes a number of accompanying events, which take place through April, including receptions and talks with the artist.
“It’s our goal to start dialogues within the community, to give more options for information and education, and I think each of those events brings in different people, engages thoughts and conversation, and it just adds to the richness of life in our area,” Bates said. “I think it’s very important to have those cultural opportunities, and we do those all free of charge as well.”
The events include two receptions, a gallery walk and talk, a dialogue, and an arts salon. Each event will include Knowles speaking on his work, including discussion of individual pieces as well as how his artistic outlook and style has morphed over the decades.
Knowles told the Sun that the exhibit is far from a retrospective, but rather a limited collection that shares the span of his work.
“My art tends not to be narrative, tends not to tell a story, and tends not to be documentary, meaning something I’ve seen in my life,” he said. “From day one my art was about the visual aesthetic, not the verbal. How it progressed however, beginning in the ’90s, I had started in this part of my life employing recognizable subject matter in my life, and that had multiple consequences.”
Part of the change was pragmatic, Knowles explained, in that he wanted an inroad for viewers to connect with the work. Abstraction is fine, but sometimes it gives viewers very few mental handholds with which to climb into it. Exploring other subjects that were recognizable, though still with plenty of stylistic abstraction, gave Knowles a more direct connection and dialogue with an audience.
A series that explores the shapes and contours of the cello are included in the exhibit. Knowles plays cello and explored the instrument visually while playing it during the 1990s. Some more recent work, which has been immensely popular, he explained, features American bison and buffalo.
“People react very emotionally to those animals,” he said. “But my reason for using them in my art is they are big and dark and suit my art, but they include an enormous narrative and iconographic background which make them interesting to me and everybody else.”
There’s also a cultural connection to the buffalo for Knowles, who is a member of the Cherokee tribe, and he plumbs the deep well of inspiration that the hulking animals deliver.
Much of Knowles’ more recent work is nature-inspired as well, including mountain ranges, other landscapes, plants, and other ideas. Mountain ranges especially suit his temperament, Knowles’ explained, because the natural shapes found in them allow him to indulge the narrative and the abstract.
“It’s an encyclopedia of exciting abstract shapes that pop up and repeat themselves and dodge in and out,” he said. “You can look at them and say they’re pretty literal, but you can also look at them and see that all those shapes coalesce into an abstract form which is what I really like about art.”
Most of the work in the exhibition is pastel chalk, which he prefers as a medium, Knowles explained. A few pieces include oil bar, which he defined as a kind of oil painting stick.
But Knowles concentrates on the pastels, which can do much more than most people assume, he said. This allows him to create a bold image, though it does come with some tradeoffs.
“A lot of my pieces utilize white paper as part of the drawing or the painting, which is kind of scary in pastel. You have to be able to accept accidents or shred a lot of stuff, and I do both,” he said. “For some reason that I don’t understand, the word ‘pastel’ has been used for years to mean unsaturated colors, and I don’t know what that’s about. It doesn’t have anything to do with the chalks that I use—they can be very intense.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne tries to avoid unsaturated colors. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 4-11, 2016.