Bettcher Gallery | Vanessa McKnight

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VANESSA McKNIGHT

Given the complete freedom to paint in any type of style, using any method with any purpose, I choose to work in a way I refer to as "cinematic photo-realism". This is a style I stumbled upon through blending what I experience in my everyday physical life with what I experience in my mind -- in terms of memory, perception, and dream association.

This is not a stream-of-consciousness type of activity for me, given that my work requires a great amount of discipline, limitation, and adherence to certain visual rules in dealing with the mimicry of photography. However, I think that the feeling of stream-of-consciousness is there, as a type of end result for the viewer. The images depicted in the thin layers of technicolor paint are not what one typically sees on the conscious level of actual reality.

The subjects in my work are often blown up to uncomfortably close proportions, or they are cropped, or fuzzy, or overly dark, or unusually vivid. They often contain ink markings of words and scrolling doodles as if the after-thought of the mind were marking its impressions in graffiti on the scene. This kind of imagery is that which is usually visualized in dreams, waking, dozing off, or floating between consciousness and unconsciousness.

It is also the type of imagery quite often used in filmmaking. Phrases like "shot through silk" and "dream sequence", which are film terms used to describe visual effects in movies could just as easily be used to describe my own painted imagery. I am fascinated by the altered world in film. I love the colors and textures and movement, the celluloid feel that separates the filmed world of movies, television, and video from the actual world in which we live. Nothing seems arbitrary in a movie because everything is magically transformed in the act of filming. If something in the background of a scene suddenly come into focus, the viewer knows that the newly focused upon thing is very important to the story. It is a very powerful ability that the film director has, which in a sense may enable he or she to briefly feel like God. In a similar way, I feel that I am illuminating the subjects of my work as subjects in a film to emphasize their importance and rid them of any arbitrary status, thereby giving both the subjects and myself a greater purpose.

Everything in life is a shifting balance of foreground and background. As trends come and go, ideas come in and out of focus, words are remembered and forgotten, people are born and die; life changes its clothes a million times. I want to salvage something of permanence in my life. At the same time, I am very aware of life's constant flux and require something flexible and alive and ever changing and growing. I obtain this through making art, specifically through the process of photographing, composing, and finally sealing my impressions of life onto canvas with ever-enduring oil paint, which, not coincidentally, is one of the few things proven to both physically and metaphysically withstand the test of time.

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