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Thomas McKnight is an
artist somewhat out of sync with his times. Born in 1941 In Lawrence,
Kansas, by generation he should have been an early pop artist or a late
neo-expressionist. But he came of age artistically during the 1970's, when
art had practically done itself in with minimalism and conceptual
experimentation. His work, full of color and image, seems to be a reaction
to that gray decade. |
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McKnight discovered art at at about age thirteen when his mother gave
him a set of oil paints, and his first painting - a snowy castle on a
hill - was similar to those he still creates. When he was sixteen,
McKnight's choice of career was confirmed by the famous designer and art
director of Harper's Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch, who told him that he
"had it".
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After growing up in various suburbs of Washington, D.C., Montreal,
and New York, he attended Wesleyan University, a small liberal arts college in
Middletown, Connecticut, where he was one of only five art majors. Perhaps
this fostered his independent, even eccentric, approach to the art "isms" of
his time.
He spent his junior year in Paris where he developed a life long love
of European civilization.
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After a year of graduate work in art
history at Columbia University, McKnight decided
against pursuing a career as
an art professor or curator. In 1964 he
found a job at Time magazine where he would work for eight years,
interrupted by a two year stint in the army in Korea. McKnight held many
jobs there, beginning as a file clerk and ending up writing advertising
copy.
During a vacation in Greece in 1970,
McKnight realized that life in a corporation was not for him. He had been
reviewing art |
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for a radio program around that same time,
and it became clear to him that the art currently popular was not his cup of
tea either. Two years later, with the cushion of his profit-sharing plan, he
left Time,
summered on the Greek island of Mykonos, and commenced painting in earnest.
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His work began to sell, although slowly, in
America and Germany. In the early 1980's he discovered a larger audience by
creating limited edition serigraph prints. By
then he had found that, for his work at the time, the silkscreen technique
was a natural choice - its brilliant colors and clean shapes
echoed his own visions. |
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In 1979 in Mykonos, McKnight finally met the muse he had been searching for in
Renate, a vacationing Austrian student. The couple married the following year,
and Renate moved to America.
Throughout the 1980s
McKnight’s art became increasingly popular, and by the end of the decade he was
at the top of his field: six books (including two in Japanese) had been devoted
to his work, and hundreds of
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silkscreen editions had been sold. His art was perhaps
even more well-known in Japan, where he was commissioned to paint a series
of views of Kobe for the city’s 1993 fair.
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In 1994 he was commissioned by the White
House to paint the first of three images for President Clinton’s official
Christmas card. In the middle of the nineties McKnight deepened his
visions, and in the process began to paint larger and more built-up
canvases.
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McKnight’s
work is represented in the permanent collection of New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as in the Smithsonian Institution.
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Today, McKnight and his wife
live in a large neo-colonial house in the picturesque village of
Litchfield, Connecticut. He has converted the top floor to a loft-like
studio where he spends most of his time reading, dreaming, and creating
pictures of real and imagined Arcadias.
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THOMAS MCKNIGHT'S WORLDWIDE APPEAL
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