Artist’s Statement
by Dustan Knight
My artistic sensibility is strongly influenced by my post graduate years in New York City. I was involved in the Expressionist movement of new artists in the eighties. Like them I believe that art should be a passionate statement from the artist’s innermost self. My subsequent study in Art History establishes a framework of artistic ideas and ideals giving my work depth and context within the historic dialogue of art and culture. I feel comfortable using various mediums. Materials and technique are simply vocabulary to express whatever I feel is important to communicate.
I have been working with watercolor during the last ten years and am fascinated by the brilliant fragile color, physical peculiarities and speed with which you can move it. It is a really fun exciting medium that reacts immediately (and not always in a predictable manner) to every thing I do or refrain from doing. In my portfolio you will see a range of ‘styles’ which reflect what I am trying to express in the work. The fresh plein air landscapes still breath. The florals, many as big as 4 x 4 feet, are practically performance works...done, because of the personality of the medium, in one Herculean effort and record the energy, psychological presence and emotional state of the creator. More recognizable images combine the narrative with a more deliberate technique to convey a nostalgia or sense of quiet mystery.
The mixed media and acrylic works have a sculptural heavy presence. The large, mixed media, acrylics are from an ongoing narrative series. The most recent episodes involve the wonderful imagination of childhood and its transformation into adolescence.
I continue to work toward a distillation of concept (the elusive perfection of ‘not too many notes - not too few ‘) drawing on themes which mean something tremendously important to me, which I attempt to convey as eloquently as possible to my viewers.