Clive Knights
Portland, Oregon, USA
Website
www.cliveknights.com
Social Media
Instagram
How would you describe your work?
Each collage is an encounter of many seemingly incongruous strangers meeting for the first time and attempting to find their common narrative. They gather together, jostle for position, present their uniquity at the same time that they discover their shared contribution to a new whole, a burgeoning synthesis... hopefully.
I am always imagining what lies beyond the fragments on the page or the wood panel in front of me as I make a collage, I consider its horizons. The whole world is present in each collage, I just happen to be focusing my attention on the tiny area in front of me while always conscious of the connectivities, the broader consequences, the world beyond. This otherness outside the frame, so to speak, is implied by the fragmentary nature of what’s inside, incomplete but gesturing towards potential completion. It’s also implied when I draw graphite lines into the collages that extend beyond the edges of the sheet, or when I make spasmodic gestural graphite marks that signal the presence of my living, active body in the creation of the work.
Each work is intended to incite the imagination of the viewer to complete the work, to fill in the gaps, to follow the gestures it bodies forth beyond the work itself and towards the world they inhabit and the life they live.
What inspires you?
Perennial human situations and the sensuous qualities of found materials inspire me. In a way the material fragments, typically paper, act as metaphors for a diversity of human traits. Each collage is an opportunity to delve into human themes and relationships, to articulate innovations of meaning, to reiterate the values and expectations we live by, to see them in a new light, reconfigured.
I love cities because they harbor and support the full range of human possibility, all the exquisite detail that encapsulates the best of us through to the worst of us. To land in the middle of a new metropolis for the first time is for me the most invigorating experience: to be among the people, their customs, their habits, their foods, their language, their communities, their neighborhoods, their worldview is unmatched by anything wild nature can offer. My collages are gestures from the midst of this beautiful human pandemonium.
Can you speak about your process?
It has taken some time to get to a point where my studio is saturated with an abundance of paper fragments already extracted from source books or magazines and lying, expectantly, in waiting to be deployed in the next new work. So, I prefer to use what’s gathered around me in the plethora of trays laid out across several work surfaces, rather than search through the stacks of books and magazines for particular images while I’m working on a collage. I am also a printmaker so I use a lot of failed prints in my collages, as well as the failed prints generously donated by other printmakers. I also use a gelli plate to create unique handprinted translucent papers to contrast with the vintage and contemporary commercial print material that I use.
I love to rip and tear because it involves the direct engagement of my hands and what they are capable of without the intervention of a tool. However, I do use scissors to tidy edges sometimes, and a sharp craft knife and steel ruler when I want straight edges to counter the ‘live’ torn edges. Ripping, I feel, is more collaborative in the sense that the paper fibers have a say in the way the rip goes by resisting this way and that, depending on the type of paper. I want the materials to be partners in the making if the work so the idiosyncrasies they can offer become valuable contributions to the potential outcome of a work. There must be a give and take, a call and response at play, such that the maker, me, is never in full control. This is perhaps why I love printmaking too because you never know exactly how the print will turn out; mysterious forces are mustered and invited to play along. Several philosophers of art have identified play as an essential dimension of the act of art making, whatever the genre.
How did you become interested in art?
Looking back to my formative years I was an early reader but grew to hate books during my schooldays, especially fiction. I used to say it was because I didn’t want to spend time inside someone else’s imagination when I haven’t fully explored my own yet. Oh, the precociousness of youth! So, consequently, from the age of 8 when I won my first drawing prize and thought I was the next Salvador Dali, I drew, and drew and drew, but never what everyone else was drawing. I couldn’t bear still life drawing in art class mainly because there was always someone else who could render the bowl of fruit more accurately than me, as if that was the standard for good art. I drew from my imagination, strange and impossible objects and places. When I was 17 I drew myself trapped in a room on a chunk of land ripped from the rest of the world and cast into open space, freed but not free. My high school art teacher said, you should be an architect, and so that’s what I became, eventually. In fact, I became a teacher of architecture and deploy collage as an integral part of my design classes. By the way, in my mid-twenties I grew to be a book lover, especially philosophy books, and those on architecture and art. Now I have too many books and, at my age, need to start giving them away.
Do you have any favorite artists, movies, books, or quotes?
The artists I enjoy most are:
Francis Bacon for his paintings that reveal the true nature of embodied human consciousness through the full range carnal postures and gestures.
Nathan Oliveira for his gorgeous monotype prints inspired by Goya.
Antony Gormley for his daily drawings often using bodily fluids or other organic mark making substances.
The architects I find most compelling are:
John Hejduk for the human stories his unbuilt inventions embrace and for his graphic journals and poetry.
Alvaro Siza for the way he choreographs the complexity of human perception in the geometry and experience of his buildings.
Everyone should have a favorite architect, after all, they shape the world in which everything else happens, so we ought to pay very close attention.
I don’t have favorite movies but rather favorite directors whose work is always fascinating: Jan Svankmajer (watch his stop-motion rendition of ‘Alice’) and Peter Greenaway (watch ‘The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover’).
My favorite living author is Raymond Tallis, a physician turned philosopher, and I’d recommend most of his books but Seeing Ourselves: Reclaiming Humanity from God and Science would be the one I’d recommend starting with. One of my favorite books is by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz titled The Bow and the Lyre on why poetry is so important in our lives.
As for quotes, I have so many I don’t think I can narrow it down. However, I have distilled a piece of wisdom gathered from several sources that I have translated into the following personal mantra:
“All things are fully present but never fully revealed.”
What advice do you have for younger artists?
Nurture and feed your curiosity above all else, without this the depth and richness of the world will remain inaccessible to you. It’ll take work, vigilance, care, effort, but the reward is priceless.
Don’t wait to be told what to do by a so called ‘expert’. Just go ahead and do it, but respect the advice of experts, even as you may ignore it or absorb it.
Remember that ideas are not real until you make something out of them (if they remain circling around in your head they will eventually evaporate or be replaced by others and forgotten). So always aim to precipitate your ideas in something made – a drawing, an artifact, some writing, whatever – translate them into some form of material presence so they can be shared. The conversation triggered by sharing will enrich these ideas as well as the ones that follow that haven’t yet happened.
Any more thoughts about art, creativity, or anything else you would like to share?
I could go on, but this is probably too long already :) If anything, I’d stress the value of play in art making, just pure play, childlike, but not childish. Relinquish some control, let the world in, let it influence your intentions, let it contribute what only it can bring, welcome the unanticipated, the strange, and let it help you turn those ideas into revelatory new work.
