Greetings XCI #2 - Wayland Academy

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.
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