SOUTHERN GROOVE: KENT KNOWLES REFLECTS ON ART ROSENBUAM, PART II
KK: Also, with Rosenbaum, I started appreciating drawing too. So instead of putting all this pressure on yourself to paint and make this painting, there's this perfect masterpiece, (you can) say let’s do some drawing now.
I really respond to that now. I prefer ballpoint pen over Conte, but the difference may be that I never really expect people to look at the ballpoint pen drawings as more than an ideation tool whereas you see a Rosenbaum Conte crayon, and you're like “how much,” you see it, and you want it. I think even at the Globe in Athens where the Sea Shanties take place; if I recall, there's this beautiful framed drawing by Rosenbaum over the bar. I remember taking drawing from him as well and responding to that. There are other influences too.
Art Rosenbaum, The Studio and the Sea, 2014, Charcoal and Conte, 44 × 50 in, 111.8 × 127 cm. VIEW ON ARTSY
JLM: What other artists excite you?
KK: These days, as I said, it's great to be part of social media because you see stuff coming down the line, and it's simultaneously exciting. It’s also a little intimidating because you see somebody working on something, and you're like, “Oh man, I gotta take it up a notch.” One artist I really like, he's actually an illustrator who has found a lot of comfort in the fine art world. They're kind of together anyway, but I think he started with a more sequential kind of illustration. Aron Wiesenfeld. It's somewhat fun because you can send messages, find painters that you like, and you can communicate with them. Sometimes they’re really cool, like Aron. He’ll shoot messages back to me, and it’s lovely to watch him develop. One of the reasons he’s my favorites, and we are about the same age, which is always fun, but his work, of course, is dealing with the figure. Many of his figures are adolescents, and he touches on those moments when you’re younger, and things are just magical. Like there's a giant rainstorm, and there's some giant drainage pipe spilling out into the quarry, and there's this holiness almost to it. They're often by themselves, not always, but his environments are just superb. There's a painting he did of a girl playing the flute right by a lakeside, and it is like she's conjuring some monster out of there, or maybe she's just finding a place to practice.
Aron Wiesenfield
Audience Question
I really admire your interpretation of the human form. Your figures have varying levels of distortion and proportions. How do you make those choices, and what is the process there?
KK: It's like you want to breathe life into your figures. Some artists are so intent on anatomical accuracy that even if the human figure they’re painting definitely looks human. You can tell exactly how old they are and exactly what time of day they're being depicted in, sometimes it can get a little clunky. I see many artists fall into that trap where they almost choke the life out of their figures because they're so highly rendered that they ended up becoming stiff or lifeless.
I'll let things just kind of fly around. I couldn't decide which head I wanted to put on a figure as I remember, so I just put them both on there. I just let one head kind of sit behind the other, and that can be interesting territory because at some point people say, well, you know, this guy doesn't know what he's doing. Still, on the other hand, if you're starting a figure from scratch or at least from what you remember about the anatomy, it's just like a signature. If everybody did that, they would have their own versions of these little humans walking around, so I give myself permission to bend and twist and do whatever.
Sometimes it's a little unnerving. I remember one of my first figurative paintings. I was in college at Savannah College of Art and Design. That's where I did my bachelor's, and there was this beautiful girl. Her name was Rach. I don't know her full name, exotic, and I remember convincing her to let me paint her in this weird velvet chair that I had at my apartment. I know we're keeping it PG 13, but anyway, I painted Rach in the chair, and she had this gesture where her arm looked like it was made out of rubber, and I tried painting it in the right way but didn’t look it.
And so I just said, you know what, let's give her a rubber arm. I like letting the figure do the movement because I think figurative painters are in a fascinating spot right now. I was having this conversation with a student about portraiture. If it's about the accuracy, we've got plenty of technology for that, so painters have to find their place in the grand scheme of figuration. I think Aaron Weidenfeld is a great example of that.
I also know one of my tried and true, Thomas Hart, Benton. I think he's got a lot of what Rosenbaum's got going. You've got this overall kind of lyrical movement.
It's almost like a rollercoaster. You jump in at the guitar and hope you live to see the steamboat. You are rolling through this thing like in a barrel going over Niagara Falls. It's a real trip. So he's definitely an influence; although he's not around very much, I still find myself painting truncated trees and things. So it just, something about the way he makes pretty amazing stuff.
Miles Cleveland Goodwin, Crooked Fingers, 2020, Oil on canvas, 24 × 30 in VIEW ON ARTSY
KK: If we're going to go a little bit more local, I love Miles Cleveland Goodwin’s work
JLM: That painting (Moth) was in Miles Cleveland Goodwin’s From the Spirit which ended several months ago. Moth reminded me of the painting Pyramid. Was that one done in response to Katrina? He's a good artist and we really like his work. I see his work as part of what Art referred to as “allegorical figurative painting”. I think all the artists mentioned today mine that territory and it’s powerful with our collectors and patrons at the gallery. What are some of your other thought about Miles’ work?
Kent Knowles, Pyramid, 2006, Oil on canvas, 36.5 x 48 in. Private Collection
KK: Well, I remember when I first started seeing his stuff come across your Instagram page, and I was like, “wow,” because there's something I think with every painter, there's a little bit of shaman in there. There's this idea of conjuring something, perhaps it didn't exist at all, and to make something out of nothing or to be inspired by something and go through the process of mimicking it to your best abilities. I think it's a primary palette and the three-dimensional quality of Miles' work that it just gets me just about every time, and it reminds me a little bit of an artist named Albert Pinkham Ryder. His paintings have disintegrated because I think he was playing around with materials, and they're super cracked now. It’s as if you're looking at a soul. The landscapes there, but then it also feels very internal and it's like those things that you feel that kind of move you. It’s sublime; you can't quite put your finger on it, but you see it a mile away, and it just kind of reverberates.
Miles Cleveland Goodwin, Ghost of a Tree, 2019, Oil on canvas, 48 × 72 in, Private Collection
Miles Cleveland Goodwin, Moth , 2020, Oil on linen, 18 × 24 in. View
JLM: Yes. That kind of goes back to what Jeff Maisey said about seeing it from a distance, and then it pulls you. Your work does that, and Rosenbaum’s and Miles’ work does that. I think art lot of the art that I like pulls you; it grabs your spirit.
KK: I don't know exactly how to define that because different attractants like, Oh, I love that color. That's fine. You can be yanked around by color or just the subject matter or even the scale. But when you see something like this (Moth), you start to wonder like, okay, he made that decision to do this, and that over there almost feels like it's completely accidental. Still, I'm so glad it's there because now this thing here works with that and so to be able to construct something and, and almost be a slave to your intuition where you allow yourself to do it. Then when you do, it's like people sense it, and maybe you're doing something that they can't do, or they don't allow themselves to do. I think Miles’s work really demonstrates that. It's like it’s pure gut. It's just gut and unapologetic. And he doesn't try to say, Oh, look, I can do this too. If I wanted to, I could paint this pearl. That's a trap that many artists fall into, you know, they have to show you.
JLM: You have a show coming up in the Netherlands. Can you comment on it?
KK: Yes. It's somewhat cool and I need to thank you for that, Lee because of the presence you've given your artists on Artsy. I think that's actually how this gallery discovered me. So I got a call, you know, a while back from a gallery in the Netherlands in Utrecht (specializing in) figurative work and they saw some of my stuff and said, Hey, would you be interested in working with us? And I said, well, of course and so I want to thank you because that happened as a result of your, representing me. it's quite cool. It's just starting with some logistical things. He likes these large paintings, like five, six-footers, and that can be extremely pricey to send over to the Netherlands. I'm currently working on unstretched canvas and just putting them in a tube and sending them over there. it's one of the great benefits that we can be seen as artists by anybody in the world.
The Artsy team is very good with that. We've been with them for over three years now, and they really brings that together, the collector culture with the artists , that dialogue is intriguing and really inspiring for us. You have some work in a show coming up here this summer you are working on for us as well.
KK: Yes, I got some things in the works. You know, one thing I liked about Rosenbaum was that he would draw his students to, and I know somewhere there exists this beautiful drawing of me and I think I had a beard at the time and I had this horrible tattoo on my shoulder and he was like, Oh, why don't you roll up your sleeve? I think the drawing ended up making me look a lot stronger.
Rosenbaum was always working on multiple surfaces. And so I adopted that practice from him as well. So this shot kind of shows what the studio looks like, where there's something half painted or about to be destroyed and then something that's just getting started.
Studio view
So yes I've got a few things. One I'm most excited about is our summer project. I know we're still working out the kinks on a title, although I like the one we're working on; I don't know if that can be revealed yet. I think I got one in here. it's always going to be the figure but I'm kind of taking a cue from Rosenbalm and Weidenfeld where I'm trying to incorporate more of the environment into the figure.
Work in progress
So it's not just a figure in a place, but like you're getting a sense of heat or maybe a cool November landscape. so something like this is in progress where you have what eventually will be fall leaves kind of gathering around this figure.
Or this is one I finished recently where I'm really pushing the more sculptural, textural quality of it, but then finding like this quiet momen of this figure just kind of hovering in space and it's not unlike the stuff that you've sold through the gallery, like Alto, which was kind of a precursor to this one, where you had this idea of easily not being grounded and just kind of getting lost, whether it's in thought or just checking out, I think a lot of us have experienced that in the last year.
Kent Knowles, Alto, Oil on canvas, 48x60 in, 2013, Private Collection
JLM: Do you have anything else to add about Rosenbaum or what you are working on?
KK: I've always appreciated the narrative quality of Rosenbaum’s work, even if you're not quite sure exactly what the narrative is. Like a lot of other artists, I had trouble producing during quarantine. I don't know if anybody out there listening had that experience as well. Cause you'd think, Oh, well, I'm at home I'm gonna make like nobody's business, but I shut down a little bit, but so the creativity found its way out in another way. So I'm actually working on a kid's book. I did one when I was in graduate school, I did one, actually. Rosenbaum was really ambitious and would say, take on a project. Yes., do that. So I actually published my first book when I was in graduate school working with Rosenbaum. So for whatever reason, that came back around. I am pushing digital painting now. I'm trying to explore that a little bit. This is one of the illustrations, again, a little bit different. This one's called In the Kingdom of Toads, and it’s basically a girl who is giving names to animals, and she gets shrunk down and has to live with them.
In the Kingdom of Toads
I write horror scripts with my brother, and I like mapping out a story, but this one is more of a pure illustrative narrative, and it’s almost done. I am shopping around for agents and a publisher right now, and I've been having a blast. I have work for the summer exhibit at LMG, and I am getting work ready for the Netherlands. Life's good. I can't complain.