ARTIST STATEMENT

My interest in abstraction and geometric forms took hold in graduate school. I had come to feel that my representational work was indebted to too many artists from the past and present, and that perhaps there were more possibilities to find my own way in abstraction. Forty-five years later, I am still at it, although my work has continued to converse with art from the past and present and from different cultures and forms, such as Amish and Gee’s Bend patchwork quilts, Navajo weavings and Islamic carpets.

ARTIST BIO

Michael Knutson received a BFA from the University of Washington and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art.  He is a Professor of Art at Reed College.  He has received an Artist Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award, Juror Awards in two Portland Art Museum Biannuals, and an award at an Invitational Exhibit of the American Academy of Arts & Letters in New York.  He is represented by Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle and is a member of Blackfish Gallery in Portland.

Folded Field #8C,  2008, is a revisit to a series of Diazo prints (blueprints) and watercolors that I made in 1974.  The subject matter of folded tracing paper is both  illusionistic and geometric. #8C shows three stages of folds from the paper’s corners. (#8A and #8B show the first and second stages of the folds.) The 2008 images were created with layers of very diluted white watercolor on Black Arches Cover, a printmaking paper.