Kent Knowles: A Passage Through Story, Symbol, and Studio Practice

Kent Knowles has spent over two decades refining a distinctive visual language—one rooted in psychological storytelling, figurative invention, and painterly experimentation. At Matney Gallery, we’ve had the privilege of exhibiting Knowles’s work across key chapters in his development, from the early mythic power of Substrata (2012) to the deeply personal reflections of Passage (2016). Through each exhibition, Knowles invites viewers into a world where narrative is implied but never imposed, and where vulnerability, transformation, and strength often share the same space. Knowles’s paintings are unmistakable. Female protagonists—often alone, often alert—inhabit surreal terrains that blur the line between dreamscape and memory. His surfaces are alive with gestural energy, yet grounded by careful design. “Design drives the bus,” Knowles has said of his process. He builds his compositions from abstraction, allowing figures to surface from layers of mark-making rather than from premeditated stories. The results are compelling, even haunting—images that live in the viewer’s mind long after the first encounter.

Substrata (2012): Excavating the Emotional Landscape

Kent Knowles’s 2012 exhibition Substrata marked a defining moment in his career and in the early trajectory of Matney Gallery’s program. Co-curated with artist Tyrus Lytton, the exhibition introduced Knowles’s work to a Virginia audience through a series of bold, psychologically charged paintings that revealed not only his technical agility, but his evolving engagement with the emotional undercurrents beneath the surface of form. The title Substrata—evoking foundational layers beneath the visible world—was apt. Knowles’s figures emerged from dense compositional groundwork, layered with intuitive mark-making and painterly correction. These weren’t simply portraits or narrative scenes; they were emotional excavations. Each work suggested a psychological topography, where female figures appeared both of and apart from their environments—often adrift in untamed natural spaces or symbolic terrain that hinted at peril, isolation, or transformation.

Kent Knowles, *Little Death,* 2013, Oil on canvas 30 ×60

What set Substrata apart at the time was Knowles’s deliberate openness to ambiguity. In a conversation surrounding the show, he remarked that even he wasn’t always certain of his subjects’ full meanings: “There’s confusion and questions in the work—even for me,” he admitted. That honesty resonated. Viewers responded to the vulnerability of the figures, and to the tension between design and raw emotion embedded in each canvas. Formally, Knowles pushed against anatomical correctness, allowing for expressive distortions that enhanced the sense of emotional weight or narrative strain. Faces were elongated or stark, shoulders sloped or squared in unexpected ways. These deviations from realism were not errors but deliberate exaggerations—ways to carry psychological tension through the body. The female figures in Substrata did not exist to illustrate—they existed to feel, to endure, to hold the viewer’s gaze with a kind of resistant poise.

The response to Substrata was immediate and strong. Collectors began acquiring Knowles’s work not only for its striking imagery but for its emotional resonance. Several key paintings from the show—works like Ojo, Dark Cloud, and Alto—found homes in significant private collections in the region. The show helped position Knowles as an artist capable of sustaining both narrative and formal complexity, while also anchoring Matney Gallery as a platform for serious figurative painting in the South.Importantly, Substrata also laid the groundwork for Knowles’s ongoing relationship with the gallery. It sparked dialogues—between artist and curator, between work and audience—that would continue through later exhibitions, including Passage and his museum shows. It also marked a moment of personal reflection for Knowles, who was navigating fatherhood and academic leadership at SCAD Atlanta. Aspects of protection, growth, and self-exploration filtered into the work with quiet intensity.

Kent Knowles, Pyramid, Oil on canvas, 36× 48

Today, Substrata stands as an exhibition that captured Knowles at a critical intersection: confident in his technique, unafraid of ambiguity, and increasingly attuned to the narrative power of the human figure. It was not just a presentation of finished paintings—it was a threshold into a deeper, more enduring phase of his practice.

Kent Knowles at the Substrata opening reception, 2012

Kent Knowles, *Urchin*, Oil on canvas, 72 x74 in, 2013

Submerged Narratives: Kent Knowles in Art House on City Square and Temporal Distortions(2013)

In 2013, Kent Knowles’s paintings Island and Urchin surfaced in an unexpected place: the former city council offices of Williamsburg, Virginia. As part of Art House on City Square and Temporal Distortions, two interlinked exhibitions curated by John Lee Matney and Tyrus Lytton, Knowles’s enigmatic female figures—partly submerged, dreamlike, and psychologically charged—inhabited the decommissioned Stryker Building, which was then awaiting demolition. The project, produced in partnership with the City of Williamsburg and spearheaded by arts coordinator Terry Buntrock, transformed a civic structure into a contemporary art space and marked a turning point in how the city engaged with its creative community.

Knowles’s contributions were haunting and elemental. In Island, a woman floats on her back in open water, her head just above the surface, a distant shoreline barely within reach. In Urchin, another solitary woman appears entangled in the limbs of an octopus, delicately holding a sea urchin in her palm. These underwater environments, both seductive and unsettling, echoed the exhibitions’ central themes of psychological displacement and temporal ambiguity. Suspended between breath and immersion, the women in Knowles’s paintings became metaphors for interior conflict and quiet endurance.

Installed inside the stark municipal offices and former city chamber, Knowles’s works created a striking tension. The old Stryker Building—once the seat of policy and governance—suddenly hosted intensely personal, symbol-rich imagery. Where debates and resolutions had once unfolded, visitors now stood before paintings that asked different questions: How do we surface after emotional disorientation? Where do vulnerability and strength intersect? The juxtaposition was not lost on the audience. Knowles’s work, shaped by narrative figuration and psychological nuance, turned the space into something deeply human—reflective rather than directive, emotional rather than administrative.

The impact was significant. Art House on City Square and Temporal Distortions opened Williamsburg’s civic core to a new kind of public dialogue—one mediated through art. Knowles’s work, in particular, helped set the tone. His quiet, suspended figures became emblems of the exhibitions’ intent: to explore the inner life of the region through contemporary Southern painting. For Matney Gallery, Knowles’s participation further deepened the gallery’s curatorial identity—rooted in storytelling, place, and painterly experimentation—and introduced his work to a broader collector and institutional audience in Virginia.

Kent Knowles, Inlet, 2013, Oil on panel, 16 ×16

Thanks to Buntrock’s leadership and the City’s willingness to experiment, the project received widespread support from civic leaders and residents alike. It catalyzed a new vision for the arts in Williamsburg, eventually leading to the inclusion of exhibition space in the newly constructed Stryker Center and the establishment of the city’s public art initiative. Knowles’s presence in that pivotal 2013 moment—as both a storyteller and a symbolist—helped anchor the exhibitions in something emotionally resonant and visually unforgettable.

His figures, submerged but still visible, captured precisely what the building itself represented at the time: a civic structure in transition, and a community testing how deeply art could reach.

Passage (2016): A Turning Point in Practice and Presentation

By the time Kent Knowles returned to Matney Gallery in 2016 for Passage, his work had evolved into a deeper register—one marked by increased introspection, technical refinement, and a willingness to expose the process behind the image. Where Substrata revealed a world of mythic struggle and emergent identity, Passage offered something quieter but no less profound: a meditation on time, transformation, and artistic legacy. Curated as both a solo exhibition and a retrospective lens, Passage brought together works spanning two decades of Knowles’s practice, from early drawings and student-era paintings to recent, mature canvases that explored themes of winter, solitude, disconnection, and ritualized memory. Encouraged by the gallery to “show what led here,” Knowles used Passage as a platform to look both backward and forward—drawing lines between the intuitive mark-maker of his youth and the deliberate visual storyteller he had become.

One of the most important gestures of the exhibition was Knowles’s inclusion of unfinished or transitional works. Inspired in part by his experience viewing Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible at the Met Breuer, Knowles curated Passage to include evidence of process—decisions still being made, compositions not yet resolved. This transparency resonated powerfully with audiences, especially among young artists and collectors eager to understand not just what Knowles painted, but how and why.

The paintings in Passage retained the hallmarks of his style—female protagonists, uncertain landscapes, emotional dissonance—but the tone had subtly shifted. Works like Doe and Breakup reflected a more restrained, lyrical voice. In Doe, a solitary figure stands poised in a pale winter field, blurring the line between hunter and hunted, dream and memory. Breakup conveyed tension not through confrontation but through spatial distance—two figures in proximity, emotionally disconnected, surrounded by open white space that acted as both silence and barrier. Several winter landscapes and portraits of girls in snow anchored the show with quiet intensity. These scenes—cool, spare, and psychologically loaded—evoked a cinematic stillness. They emphasized Knowles’s growing interest in atmosphere as character and the symbolic potential of season and setting. Snow became a metaphor for exposure, clarity, and emotional latency. A large surreal painting of two girls at a picnic formed one of the exhibition’s visual and conceptual keystones. Lavish and strange, the food-strewn tableau teetered between intimacy and absurdity. It was not a scene of joy but of estrangement, each figure absorbed in her own interior world despite their shared ritual. This tension—between abundance and alienation, closeness and distance—echoed across the show, deepening the emotional and symbolic stakes of Knowles’s work.

For Matney Gallery, Passage was a watershed moment. It allowed the gallery to present an artist in full dialogue with his past, an uncommon privilege in a commercial space. The show drew collectors from across the state and catalyzed new institutional interest in Knowles’s work. Educators, curators, and emerging artists came to see not just a painter—but a working model of what a long-view studio practice could look like. Within the Virginia art scene, Passage helped cement the gallery’s role as a venue for rigorous, narrative-driven painting. The exhibition’s academic depth, paired with its emotional accessibility, struck a chord with audiences hungry for work that didn’t shy away from ambiguity or feeling. It affirmed that Matney Gallery could sustain a thoughtful, museum-adjacent program in a region often overlooked by national press, and it positioned Knowles as one of the strongest narrative painters working in the South. In the years since, Passage has become a reference point—for the gallery, for collectors, and for Knowles himself. It affirmed the value of showing the arc, not just the arrival. And in doing so, it opened the door to more complex and vulnerable conversations between artist, audience, and institution.

Passage Live Demo Event: Process in Real Time, Painting as Discovery

One of the most memorable elements surrounding Passage was the live painting demonstration held in conjunction with the exhibition—an intimate and revealing event that brought Knowles’s working process directly into the gallery space. For collectors, students, and fellow artists in attendance, the demo offered more than a glimpse behind the curtain; it was a rare opportunity to witness the generative tension between spontaneity and structure that defines Knowles’s work. Rather than arriving with a fixed composition or a neatly choreographed plan, Knowles began the canvas much as he begins his studio pieces: with loose, searching marks. “Design drives the bus,” he reiterated to the crowd, as quick strokes began to resolve into a seated figure. Over the course of the session, the painting moved through multiple stages—moments of clarity, erasure, reinvention—mirroring the internal rhythm that governs his private practice. Viewers watched as Knowles adjusted proportions, shifted posture, and built narrative through subtle distortion and layering.

More than just a technical showcase, the demo became a kind of performance—an open meditation on doubt, revision, and the psychology of image-making. Knowles spoke candidly throughout, describing how figures often emerge uninvited from the chaos of the surface, and how he resists literal storytelling in favor of emotional suggestion. “I don’t always know what the painting is about until I’ve ruined it once or twice,” he joked—half in jest, half in truth. What made the event especially compelling was the way it fused his identities as both painter and educator. As Associate Chair of Fine Arts at SCAD Atlanta, Knowles is deeply familiar with guiding others through the uncertainties of creative practice. In the gallery, this pedagogical instinct remained present but informal. Rather than instruct, he reflected aloud—on distortion as a kind of psychological compression, on the usefulness of failure, on the quiet thrill of not knowing what will happen next. Though the resulting painting remained unfinished—and was not intended for sale—the work took on a unique life of its own. It was eventually retained as a studio artifact, a kind of echo or residue of the Passage moment. In contrast to the resolved works hanging on the walls, the demo painting became a record of uncertainty in motion, and a tribute to the idea that process is itself worthy of exhibition.

For Matney Gallery, the demo underscored a key curatorial value: that artists are not only makers of objects, but carriers of insight. By inviting the public into the making, we invited them into the questions that drive the work—not just the answers it offers. And for Knowles, the event reflected the core of Passage itself: a willingness to linger in the in-between, to let meaning arrive slowly, and to trust that what’s unfinished is often the most honest expression of all.

From Tribute to Legacy: Kent Knowles at the Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts

In 2022, Matney Gallery had the honor of partnering with the Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts on a landmark exhibition: Art Rosenbaum and Friends: Three Excellences of Culture. Curated as a celebration of the legendary painter, folklorist, and mentor Art Rosenbaum, the exhibition brought together works by Rosenbaum, his wife Margo Newmark Rosenbaum, and a selection of artists who had been shaped by his teaching and spirit. Among them was Kent Knowles—an inclusion championed by gallery founder Lee Matney. For Matney, Knowles’s participation in the show was not just fitting—it was essential. As a former student of Rosenbaum’s at the University of Georgia, Knowles represented a continuation of Rosenbaum’s commitment to narrative painting grounded in personal mythology, regional nuance, and painterly discipline. His presence in the show symbolized a generational bridge between tradition and innovation, echoing the very ethos of the exhibition.

Two works were selected: Future and Cradle. Both paintings revealed Knowles at his most vulnerable and resonant. Future, in particular, stood out—a portrait of the artist’s young son rendered in rich, earth-toned acrylic, surrounded by fantastical flora set against a darkened sky. The piece carried an unmistakable emotional charge: part personal memento, part allegory for growth, fragility, and the unknown. With wide, reflective eyes and a posture both grounded and otherworldly, the boy becomes more than a subject—he becomes a proxy for all that we hope for, and all that we cannot protect. Positioned among works by Rosenbaum and other former students, Future revealed how deeply Knowles’s sensibility echoes that of his mentor, while remaining entirely his own. It was intimate, mythic, and formally rigorous—a meditation on inheritance in every sense of the word.

The success of the Art Rosenbaum and Friends exhibition laid the foundation for a return to the Pearl Fincher Museum in 2025, this time with a solo installation. The Realm of Smaller Things, based on Knowles’s 2022 children’s book, transformed the Cole Gallery into an immersive storybook experience. Designed with families in mind, the installation invited visitors to enter the miniature world of Jane, a girl who shrinks and explores a magical forest—a metaphorical echo of Knowles’s recurring themes: the navigation of strange terrain, the search for meaning in the unknown, the power of inner resilience.

Unlike the brooding solitude of his figurative canvases, The Realm of Smaller Things was luminous and imaginative, filled with tactile elements, photo opportunities, and hand-painted scenery. And yet, it carried the same emotional intelligence as his gallery work. It was not a departure, but an expansion—proof that Knowles’s narrative strength could traverse media and audience without sacrificing depth.

For Matney Gallery, both exhibitions represented key institutional milestones for Knowles and reinforced the gallery’s long-term investment in his career. From a tribute to a mentor, to an environment crafted for the next generation, Knowles’s trajectory at the Pearl Fincher speaks to the enduring relevance of storytelling in contemporary art—and to the importance of curatorial relationships that champion not just individual works, but the arc of a practice.

Kent Knowles, Search Party, 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 in

Educator, Community Builder, and Global Exhibitor

Beyond the studio and gallery walls, Kent Knowles has built a career defined by generosity—toward his students, his city, and the broader artistic dialogue that stretches across borders. As Associate Chair of Fine Arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Atlanta, Knowles has helped shape a generation of young artists, guiding them not just in technique, but in the habits of inquiry, experimentation, and sustained practice.

Teaching, for Knowles, is not a parallel track—it’s an integral part of his own creative process. “You become hyper-aware of your own choices when you're standing in front of a classroom,” he’s said. “You can't tell students to be fearless unless you're risking something yourself.” This ethos carries through in his mentorship, his openness about failure and revision, and his active engagement with the questions his students bring into the studio. Many of them continue on to successful careers, citing his clarity, encouragement, and example as foundational.

That sense of engagement extends beyond the classroom. Knowles has long believed that artists should be visible contributors to their communities—not only through gallery exhibitions, but through public art, collaboration, and dialogue. A recent example is his leadership in SCAD’s mural project at Phipps Plaza in Atlanta, where he designed Find Yourself on the Green, a 17-foot public artwork installed at the luxury retail center in 2023. The mural combined Knowles’s signature narrative figuration with stylized representations of Georgia’s flora and fauna, creating a scene of surreal vibrancy. With a buck (symbolizing Buckhead), birds, and fantastical greenery, the work blended whimsy with grounded symbolism. SCAD students helped bring the project to life and integrated augmented reality features, allowing visitors to animate the mural through their phones—merging traditional painting with new media engagement.

Projects like Find Yourself on the Green are a testament to Knowles’s ability to translate his private studio practice into public storytelling—without losing nuance or complexity. They also reflect his belief in mentorship as a living practice: students weren’t just watching him paint; they were part of the process, gaining real-world experience in public art production and creative problem-solving.

Knowles’s reach extends far beyond Atlanta. His paintings have been exhibited internationally, with shows in Tel Aviv, London, Paris, and Utrecht. Early in his career, he participated in the International Young Art exhibition organized by Sotheby’s and ArtLink, with venues in New York and Israel. Subsequent exhibitions in Europe—including New Artists, New Art on Cork Street in London and Pour l'Amour des Chiens at the Bismarck Foundation in Paris—introduced his work to collectors drawn to narrative figuration and psychological depth.

Today, Knowles is represented in Europe by Morren Galleries (Utrecht, Netherlands), where his large-scale paintings continue to find resonance with international audiences. His work has also been featured through platforms such as Gallerease, which describe his figures as "caught in lush terrain, often in perilous or ambiguous states of being"—a description that travels well across languages and cultures.

Whether mentoring students in Atlanta, creating immersive museum environments, or sending his paintings across oceans, Knowles operates with a rare continuity of vision. His commitment to storytelling—rooted in gesture, symbol, and the inner life of his subjects—has made his work both regionally grounded and globally legible. And through it all, he remains deeply connected to the communities that shaped him, from the classrooms of SCAD to the gallery walls of Virginia and beyond.