Greetings XCI #2 - Wayland Academy

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alumniartists T errill Knaack `68 has been the Peter J. Seippel Artist-in-Residence at Wayland Academy for six years, and his contributions to the school have been both wonderful and diverse. Terrill leads students in photography, drawing, and art in innovative classes such as “Learning To See: Union of Art and Science.” He has also planted and maintains with the students a Native Plants Study Site prairie garden in front of Discovery Hall. Meanwhile, he leads weekend excursions to some of the more beautiful natural areas throughout Wisconsin. Photo by Sue Knaack TERRILL Knaack
Terrill has a reputation for being one of the most interesting people to speak to on campus. Conversation with Mr. Knaack rarely dissolves into the standard platitudes but always seems to end up engaging with art and the natural world in new or unusual ways. The Greetings staff sat down with Mr. Knaack for an interview in his Sunny Point Studio on Beaver Dam Lake. Greetings: How important is communication in your art classes? TK: You’d be surprised. There have been some students that have come to Wayland from other schools where they’ve had art, and they expect that they’re going to sit in a corner and not participate in class. Greetings: So you would posit communication as prior to representation? TK: Well, art as a form of communication is a more holistic form of communication than perhaps other things. It encompasses a certain analytical cerebral aspect, it’s emotional, and it’s visceral: it has an instinctive aspect to it. And some art is stronger, in each of those three ways than others, but you see this in students, too. When you have a student in art class for a couple of weeks, you notice that some of them are much more emotionally centered, some of them are more instinctive/visceral, some of them are real analytical, logical. They look at a painting, and they start analyzing it. So the ideal is to build on that (we use this term holistic or integrative) to find a relationship between the other basic intelligences that a human being has. We are three-centered or three-brained beings. Not only visual art does that, but also poetry does that beautifully. Poetry goes right along with the visual arts and so does music. As a matter of fact, a lot of what I teach is in analogies with music because it is very, very similar. All art boils down to the study of form at some point or another. That’s what we teach: a sensitivity to the interrelationship of form. Greetings: When I look at your paintings, I’ve always been struck by how well you represent nature. You have a real insight and talent at doing what most people today rely on photographs to do. TK: A very important aspect of my work is that it’s done from observation and not photographs. I’ve always been interested in photography and a lot of my education was with some great photographers. I studied with Minor White at MIT and knew a lot of the classical great fine-art photographers back in the 70’s. So I’ve always had an interest in large format photography and wanted to make that part of my life. But I wanted to show that the relationship between a camera, the man behind the camera, and the subject, is very different from the relationship of what I’m doing when I’m out sketching in nature. That relationship with the subject and the way I’m capturing it is quite a bit different. There are certain parallels, but with the camera, the medium of photography is basically just light, as I see it. I’m just interested in what light is communicating to me. And what I find so fascinating about taking pictures is that pictures find you. Light finds you, in a certain way, and that picks up your attention. If you follow your attention through, the thing will speak to you and tell you how to do it. That’s the way I experience it. Morning in May Greetings: Have you had moments when painting in which you realize you’ve done something in the representation of the object that could not have been done by a photograph? TK: Oh yeah, absolutely (gestures to prints). What you’re looking at here are mostly reproductions of the artwork. They’re all reduced. A reproduction is not ideal, it’s not the work itself. It’s a real reality of being an artist, though, because most people aren’t going to spend the money that you’re going to get for original art. And so you try to do as well as you can with a reproduction to make them long term collectible items if you can. These are all pigmented, all done on canvas and extremely expensive to do, actually. And these will last for hundreds of years, just like the original art will, but they are not the real thing. Let’s take a look at one of the paintings here: (Walking to original “Morning in May”) TK: You see the pigment? You see the brush strokes? None of that has anything to do with photographic representation. I do have my plein aire paintings. There are some of my studio paintings, especially some of my earlier paintings that are more tightly done. Everything I’m doing now is really strong on conveying the spirit of the paintings through the brushstroke. www.wayland.org 3 ALUMNI ARTISTS
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Page 20 and 21: COMMENCEMENTby Tyler Graham 2009 18
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