Conor Knight

Meanjin/Brisbane-based Conor Knight depicts his floral subjects boldly illuminated and set against spare grounds. Light plays across their petals and stems, dissolving hard edges and contours, lending particular brilliance to flashes of cream and pink as they turn from light to dark, pivoting at varying degrees towards and away from a lamp.

In these darkened, close environments, the overall effect is an atmospheric envelope: a small, secluded world in which the flowers are the sole subject, set against solid bands of colour. Within these confines, Knight’s blooms possess a striking vitality. Broad strokes and gestures take precedence over the pursuit of exact likeness, yet his subjects remain strikingly lifelike, their essential character captured with remarkable economy.

Coursing through Knight’s work is a care for his medium that begins at its earliest stages. He mulls his own paints, allowing him precise control over their viscosity and performance on the canvas. “I’ve really come to appreciate the unique quality of oil as the binding agent in paint,” Knight says. “Oil is able to hold light within. When light hits the surface of an oil painting, some of that light passes through the paint and reflects within the oil.”

This sensitivity to the material extends to the ground beneath the paint. In a stylistic flourish, Knight allows elements of the imprimatura to poke through: the initial layer of colour that provides the starting point for all that follows. Far from serving merely as a preparatory layer, the ground remains an active element within the final composition, lending the work an almost weathered quality, as though uncovered after centuries.

Imbued with a genuine love for his medium and the art of making pictures, Knight’s paintings bring together theatricality and intimacy, sensuous beauty and a lively, searching engagement with paint.

This year, Conor Knight received the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship.