Art is Freedom: Bob Knox in Newport

By Newport This Week Staff | on June 08, 2023

He couldn't draw well, but became an illustrator who designed covers for The New Yorker. As a high school student, he studied sculpture at Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but wanted to be a painter.

In two locations in Newport, you can see the varied work of Bob Knox, who developed his own method as he taught himself to paint, embraced art as a form of freedom, struggled to make ends meet, enjoyed some good fortune and now paints because he must.

Andrea Keogh Gallery and Hammetts Hotel are showing paintings by the Connecticut artist through June 21 in exhibitions co-curated by Keogh and Newport Curates. What you’ll see is a variety of painting styles, from pure abstraction and super-realistic and precise interiors to amazingly complex aerial views of cities, most likely New York.

Knox has never shown his work in Newport. As it turns out, Keogh is his connection by way of New York, where she once had a gallery in Soho.

"She introduced me to Jack Shainman, whose gallery was in the same building as hers," he said. "He looked at my work and said he loved my paintings, and he sold a ton of them."

"Hindu Hydrangeas," 78 x 68, acrylic on canvas.

Knox's career blossomed from there, but it took a long time before he realized his dream of becoming a painter. "I loved art from the time I was a child," he said. "I wanted to paint, but I didn't know how. At school [Wesleyan University], I studied sculpture because I was so bad at drawing and painting. I guess your brain matures and you learn and develop your own way."

As part of an exchange programduring his first semester at boarding school, he stayed with a family in Rennes and did what he calls "strictly academic training." His love for modern art and artists like Picasso, Matisse, Leger and others primed him to maintain his goal of becoming a painter and influenced the styles he has pursued since.

"After college, my work was very weak," he said. "I traveled in Europe and North Africa and was doing watercolors and pencil drawings because I couldn't afford much else. I moved back to the U.S. in 1985 and started to paint. It was a way to find out how paint works. My studio was in my house, so I used acrylics. By then, my wife and I had a young son, and we didn't want a stinky turpentine smell in the house."

"Palm Springs," 52 x 42, acrylic on canvas.

Knox took illustration jobs to meet the family's monthly budget. "I never considered myself an illustrator," he said. "I wanted to be a painter. The illustration jobs funded the painting."

Diana Klemin, a family friend who was a book designer and editor at

Doubleday, encouraged him to submit illustrations to The New Yorker, something he thought beyond his reach given the thousands of illustrators who submit to the magazine. His inventive, complicated illustrations appeared on more than 20 covers in the 1980s and ’90s when Bob Gottlieb was the editor. When Tina Brown replaced Gottlieb, she took the magazine in a different direction that did not fit Knox's style.

After retiring last year from 22 years of teaching journalism at the University of Rhode Island, John Pantalone, the founding editor of Newport This Week, is happy to be writing for the paper again.

Once Knox had made enough paintings, by the mid-1980s, he pounded the sidewalks of New York hoping to connect with a gallery. But it wasn't easy.

"A lot of it is about lucky breaks, being in the right place at the right time." he said. "I didn't really know where to begin with making large paintings, which is what I wanted to do. One day, I found this magazine called The Ladies Home Journal of Decoration. It was filled with tinted photos of interiors. I made a living room picture, and it was almost abstract. It was as if I had done it a thousand times before. I did seven more that year. My wife thought I was crazy."

He took pictures of the paintings to a drug store to have prints made from the photo machine. "That's when I sent them to Andrea's gallery in Soho," he said. "There was nowhere else for me to send them."

In a nod to serendipity, Knox said he has no idea how or why he got lucky and found opportunities. "You create your own center of gravity," he said. "There are thousands of people in line with you. You always have to find the back way in."

Despite painting for nearly four decades, Knox feels like he is just getting started. Using photographs to create sketches, he eventually works layers of paint up slowly.

"I’ve done a lot of different paintings," he said. "It's just a way I found that works for me. It takes patience. It makes a difference to me to get the color just right. You feel it out. It's a sense you develop over the years."

Supported by his sense that be- ing able to paint what he wants is a form of freedom, his styles have ranged from cubism to abstraction. "I like trying different things," he said. "I like to play, and there is a certain amount of whimsy in my work. I want people to feel something. It's not so much about your mind as your feeling."

With no political or social motivation in mind, he continues to work from photographs, sketching first in a collage like fashion as he moves different elements around until he sees the right image.

"My best working sketches come from letting my guard down," he said. "I’m not trying to think too much, and I get bored doing the same thing again and again. There's some adventure in it. Even if it doesn't always work out, there is the thrill of discovery. Something unique; something to take you out of normal day-to-day experiences."

Making paintings at this chaotic time in the world could take an artist in many directions, including a dead end, when trying to make sense of the turbulence. Knox said he prefers to concentrate on his world.

"Truth is a loose term right now," he said. "At least for me, it's easier in my world of art. I’m not hurting anybody. Having no agenda means more freedom and independence."

NOTEWORTHY:

Later this month, two galleries open intriguing shows. Overlap, the new gallery on Van Zandt Avenue, opens a show June 21 featuring four artists pursuing the theme of personal and cultural relationships with intimate spaces. The show includes paintings by Lee Ann Scotto Adams, sculpture and painting by Jean Blackburn, a collage by Ernest Jolicoeur, and paintings by Kirstin Lamb.

Jessica Hagen Fine Art turns its space over to the painter Hunt Slonem, one of Hagen's primary artists, beginning June 24. She has given him a solo show every summer, so that it has become a tradition of sorts.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment

Name *

Email *

Website

Δ

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.