Michael Kindred Knight

Gallery Affiliations: Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Region: Pacific Coast

Website: http://michaelkindredknight.com

City / State: Los Angeles, CA

My paintings represent complex pictorial situations that synthesize historical idioms. They are a unique genre-bending marriage of artifice and disrupted, dissected, and repurposed codes of mark making that are built on modernist abstract strategies and motifs. Neither strictly landscape-based nor pure abstraction, the works inhabit an in-between space that is as much about a formal appreciation and relationship to other paintings as it is about undermining the logic of any specific style or historical program.

I use color to establish a range of artificial constructs in which place, time, light, atmosphere, gravity, and organic and architectonic structures are equally active. Composed of adjacent and overlapping layers of wet-on-wet and dry brushstrokes, the mark making is direct and accessible, by turns revealing and concealing. Each painting looks like a complete, unified whole in which shapes appear to be spatially connected. They also seem to drift apart, free of one another’s influence. Forceful yet lacking volume, their dimensionality is implied and interrupted, establishing a sense of impermanence.