Cynthia Knott: Gardiners Bay
May 8 - June 14, 2002

Cynthia Knott’s recent paintings reflect her deep love of, and reverence for, the sea in all of its guises. While providing just enough reference to sea, sky, clouds and horizon to ground the viewer in reality, Knott’s paintings have a minimalist quality which inspires contemplative reverie.

Knott’s paintings begin on the beaches and shores near her home in Eastern Long Island. Preferring the most inclement of weather, she works even her largest canvases on site by the sea, though they often require lashing down against the wind. “Painting in changing light an weather allows me to use techniques that record the passage of time, scraping and painting until a skin of memory and process is built up,” she says.

Knott creates the atmospheric surfaces of her paintings with layers upon layers of sizing, gesso, metallic pigments, encaustics and oils. These are repeatedly built up and scraped away over the course of weeks or months under varying conditions of weather, light, mood and observation until the canvases reach their final state. The use of encaustic enables her to achieve a transparency, atmosphere and resonance from within that would not be possible in other mediums.

“In my paintings, I am not trying to capture and exact moment in time,” Knott observes. “I prefer to work when conditions are changing, the transition times of day into night, storm into clearing and vice versa. The use of encaustic enables me to transfer this mutability into the works themselves and the finished paintings keep changing constantly with the shifting light of various times of day.” The resulting canvases depict a time between times, often a moment of silence in which the memory or the foreshadowing of an event is clearly conveyed.

The above exhibition will run concurrently with Anne Harris: Recent Paintings.