Page 42 - Studio International - January 1967

Justin Knowles : 'dimensional paintings'

Paul Overy

Justin Knowles, born in 1935, Justin Knowles' work seems at first to lie somewhere be- animates this surface by working across it, rather than
worked as an advertising tween painting and sculpture. Yet it would be more following it, as in most painted metal sculpture. Knowles'
executive in commerce
between 1958 and 1965, when accurate to describe it as environmental painting, or work has developed from conventional two-dimensional
he resigned to concentrate (Knowles' own description of it) 'dimensional painting'. rectangular canvases, through half-pyramid shaped can-
on painting. During this Knowles has said : 'Sculptural forms are an emotive vases that go up against the wall and still relate to it, to
period he travelled
extensively in France, platform for my painting and offer the extension of free-standing, canvas-covered shapes and spheres, half-
Greece, and East and West dimension without loss of a flat working surface. My spheres and polyhedrons of fibre-glass.
Africa, and in 1965 visited painting is not concerned with emphasis of the sculp- Knowles employs a limited range of colours from a
New York. He now teaches
part-time at Bath Academy of tural form although the visual activity of the painting is standard make of acrylics, applied straight from the pot.
Art, Corsham, and lives near integrated in some way with the form.' Colour used in this way loses nearly all of its associative
Chudleigh in Devon. He has The flat surface is always preserved as a field for paint- qualities. One tends to read Knowles' red not as 'red'
exhibited in many mixed
shows, including the John ing although this surface may turn through several but as 'Rowney's cryla light cadmium red'—as that parti-
Moores Exhibition 1965, and planes, or curve continuously in the shape of a cone or a cular shade of paint itself, standardized by the manu-
the New Generation: 1966 at truncated cone, a sphere or a half-sphere. The painting facturer. This deliberate limitation of colour paradoxi-
the Whitechapel Gallery,
London. He has had one-man
shows at the Gallerie
Cadario, Milan, 1966, and at
Royal Marks Gallery, New
York, January 1967

Works shown by Justin
Knowles at an exhibition
held at his London studio in
the autumn of 1966—
maximum height 84 in.,
acrylic paint on fibre-glass
and canvas.