Why do you want to draw what you already know? The best you can get, that way, is accuracy, which is boring. Allow yourself to be surprised; risk learning something. If you get too good at this technique, switch to your left (or other) hand and/or put a paper bag over your head, and turn around 3 times before you start. (Excerpted from “How to Draw Wrong” by Grace Knowlton)
How do you dare to rethink what you already, positively, know? When you encounter piles of dirt on your morning pooch walk, why not just walk on by? It’s dirt. Well, if you are Grace Knowlton, there is no way you could contain the gasp while intrigued by the mound of earthy stuff most likely destined for a cement mixer towards construction of the foundation of a new (people) home. No matter that the destruction of trees will disturb a vital ecological system. (And the seed munching birds who will have difficulty adapting to other flavored seeds of the neighboring trees will slowly disappear) For now, never mind to that tragedy. Here, I only speak about Art.
Grace Knowlton came home from her walk that day and set about creating a body of work that lasted for years. Drawings, paintings, ceramic sculptures got created – all representing, from her unique mind’s eye perspective, dirt piles! Intrigued by unconstrained possibilities – the imagery of “mound–iness” which emerged from a practically reverential escapade of accomplishments in her studio – Grace set about ascribing all sorts of meaning to her one time encounter along a Hudson River path in Palisades, New York.
“I thought I’d seen God in that pile of dirt”, she told writer Anna Hammond. “ Either that or I lost my cotton-picking mind”. Even if she did lose her mind, she earned it back in a relentless pursuit of finding meaning (possibly enlightenment) in dirt mounds.
First there are the things we know and can see and touch and when it comes to construct this reality, it’s straight thinking or sequential. Then there is nature –“where things do not happen in sequences, but all together….transcends intellectual thinking…
Excerpted from “The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism” by Fritjof Capra.
Frankly, I think Grace did see something mystical in that dirt pile. It’s clear when you walk into her home and studio (one of several on her grounds), full of work on the walls, floors, shelves, stairs, even (or maybe especially) her guest bathroom. Inside/ outside merge, in a natural way, through large windows framing enormous to smaller spheres rigorously incorporated within rolling grassy fields.
Wait! What about the birds?
To experience Knowlton’s work is to enter a realm of simultaneity and infinite potential: such as, the unity of all opposites, the exceptions to traditional thinking and protocol, the binding of three dimensional surfaces with two dimensional concepts, and the memorable images of every place she has visited.
Metaphorically speaking, Grace gives us an eyeful of ideas regarding all manners of orderly and disorderly life and a bank of architectural constructs to consider– like photographs of wooden chairs for example.(exhibited 2007 in the Ellenville Regional Hospital) What is she talking about in her closed spherical forms (exhibited 2006 in the 10x10x10 Ellenville Storefront Exhibition) whose footprints are a mere tap on the ground? Or what of the humpy mounded shapes, chock full of weight, unashamedly sprawled on shelves? Are these visual reminders of our fragile birth, or suggestion of safe haven for birds, our babies, our memories and dreams, our anythings? Sometimes we make things out of wood because that is the way it’s done, because it’s beautiful and strong and plentiful, for the moment. Sometimes we refer to wood in art because it’s either endangered or connected to something broader than it’s mere singularity. I think all of Grace’s work does this. It is never just itself. It’s us and the birds and the fragile sounds of many voices saying different and important things. It’s the sky and the earth squeezing us together, like maybe inside one of those 4 ‘ spheres Storm King Art Center commissioned in the ‘70’s. And there is Grace, considering it all and continuously developing an artistic language telling us what she thinks.
Outside of her art, Grace’s daily life gets woven into her work and vice versa. (While traveling cross country with her daughter, she collected dirt and other detritus in plastic baggies) Inside of her studio, is a palpable regard for harmonious-ness and while putting precious decay together within a well tuned, vastly rehearsed, formalistic art practice, we, the audience, get to go our own interpretive way while fused to her intense collection of memory and abstraction.
Grace Knowlton lives and works in Snedens Landing, Palisades, NY. Besides teaching at the Art Students League, exhibiting widely, her works are in collections such as
Yale University Art Gallery, Storm King Art Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Omi, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Mobil Corporation and much more. Check out her website: www.graceknowltonart.com. It is well worth the trip to a solo exhibition of her sculpture, drawings and photography at the Lesley Heller Gallery 16 East 77th Street in Manhattan through February 9th. Call 212 410 6120 for gallery hours.
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