Cool fresh start (personal intro)

[abknight@zzzzzz]

CV for Bill Knight

1972 junior high school painting teacher, Ms. Collins
informs me I am remarkably talented but could I please
wait a few years before I take another painting course.
1973  After school late after throwing clay.  Make plaster
block cast from milk carton and attempt to carve.  Decide
this is crazy and go back to clay.
1976 College drawing teacher measures our work by weight.
I roll mine up with a hammer in the middle.
1978 Still fiddling with college.  Leave a perfectly good
university to go to cult art school in New York (New York
Studio School) where I might give myself completely to the
faith.   Drawing instructor removes strong prescription
glasses to draw from life.  For that matter he doesn't
even look at his drawing.  While he draws.
I have luck to be studio mate with Anthony Galbraith, a
wonderful Aussie painter/ sculptor.  Of the whole beehive
he is the only one who isn't representitive or
expressionistic.  He is cool headed, uses a ruler and
thinks alot.  He paints on huge looming reliefs of foam
core that resemble decks of aircraft carriers or glacier
walls.  He rules my thinking for years afterwards.
1981-83  Work in parents basement.
1984-86 Work in basement of house where I rent room.  At
this point I was pretty much seeing burning bushes.  I
would see fairly complicated cylindrical and rectilinear
forms as though projected on my wall and would commit them
to existince in wood, foam core and acrylic paint.  I was
extremely finish oriented, wanting the material to look
unpainted and of its own essence, I would spackle heavily
with colored modelling paste, then sand down to a 320 grit
finish.  I liked the dusty look.  It was really hard to do
corners and edges without going though the paste to the
foam core.  Nothing abstract about it.  Think of self as
concretist.  Was house painter occasionally.
1987/88 Went bicycling and paddling.
1889-92 Worked in a shop building parade floats and
ceremonial sets for his majesty the Veiled Prophet and his
court of love and beauty.
1992-93  Director of float shop tells me I'm no good
having been ruined by "art school".  I quit and turn my
tiny apartment into full time studio.  Drink lots of
coffee.  Paintings are now in a friends garage.  Did some
larger carved styrofoam relief pieces.  Start to think
about embedded forms, such as the intersection of a hipped
roof.  Seperate forms on 90 degree axes passing through
each other.
1993-95 Travel, work as landscaper
1995 to present  Live on small farm in remote Ozarks
having married a high school art teacher / equestrienne /
artist.  Do house keeping, outside chores and things
involved in keeping and breeding horses and maintaing
small farm.  No kids, mqny cats and dogs.  Farm has old
garage which becomes a work shop.  Having place to do it,
it occurs to me that stone might be a good material for
all these clay pinwheels and kaiser rolls that have
started to pile up.  All are of merged and intersecting
bodies but I gone from two to four bodies.  Start in
alabaster.  Take long detour casting in bronze.  Do
several whimsical or merged body marble pieces.  Images
resolve in my out of some emotional medium in my mind.  My
uncle had been on a good roll and enjoying life.  It
conjured an image of billowing plane sort of a flying
carpet sort of thng and I carved it.  Gestural I guess.
Latest detour is an exacting clay maquette done from life
of naked human.  It wasn't my idea.  Call me if you want
to talk about pointing or enlarging.  Just don't ask me to
do it.  The project is a commision that has run aground
repeatedly, this time apparently because I took a list
contributor's advice a got a lawyer to draw up a contract.
 Oh well.  Maybe if I'm luchy I'll never have to carve the
thing.  More the better to have time to explore Missouri
Red, our large crystalled and fractious local granite.  Am
currently swinging the hammer on four foot tall linga sort
of thing, just seeing what it wants to be.  I am a fully
fledged amatuer.

I enjoy the list for it's workplace chatter and imaginary
company when I chisel alone.  It gets me to thinking of
showing up at the work site and getting busy and helps me
motivate.  I also now know alot more about Marcel Duchamp
and his ready-mades.  Fascinating.  There are few
ready-mades, they mostly exist in photographs which are
actually composites combining views from several angles.
He has extacted an essence of space-time travel, which of
course we do incessantly, and is really our favorite thing
to do as we move about our work, looking and carving.
Moving and looking.  What a clever person to make a
collapsed experience of what we see when we move and look.
 And to create an entity that possesses it's past and
future as well the movements required to see the different
views.

Bill
abknight