A. R. Knight, landscape painter
My blogs
| Industry | Arts |
|---|---|
| Occupation | landscape painter, watershed steward |
| Location | Duanesburg, NY, United States |
| Introduction | I grew up on a small part-time farm in Rhode Island. It's all paved over with shopping malls and office parks now. There is bitter irony in the woods where I wandered and absorbed the feel of the forest and its critters. They are now home to a Dick's Sporting Goods megastore. I studied agriculture and other environmental sciences at URI, wrote a masters thesis at Cornell about land trusts, wrote for American Agriculturist and edited New England Farmer. Now I paint instead, and give a lot of time to stewardship of a watershed. And I paint perhaps to climb the family tree to get closer to British ancestors who were accomplished artists: Dawson Dawson-Watson; John Dawson Watson and his brother Thomas; Joseph P. Knight, his daughter Clara Knight, and his nephew Joseph Ogden Knight. They set the bar high. I owe a debt of gratitude to that milk-hauling tanker truck that drove by me one day on I-90 in upstate New York. On its side was this unlikely slogan: "The key to life is what you add to it." It remains the most succinct differentiation between illustration and art I ever saw. It guides me. |