Stuart Knowles (b.1948)

Born: Cornwall

Studied: Slade School, Winchester School of Art, Farnham School of Art
Worked in Space Studios, London 1969-88
Returned to Cornwall: 1988

Selected One Person Exhibitions:
2004
'French Hill Notes - The Gorge Galamus Studies', 6 Chapel Row, Bath
1996
'Winter Bay Studies', Austin Desmond 1996
1991
Newlyn Art Gallery
1987
Marlene Eleni Gallery, London
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Selected Mixed Exhibitions:
2004
'29 to 92', Belgrave St Ives
1999
Belgrave Gallery, St Ives (also regularly from 2000)
1994
'Show Case', Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro
1993
'Demarco's Choice', Newlyn Art Gallery
1992
'Artists from Cornwall', Royal West of England Academy, Bristol
1984
'The City's Pictures', Barbican Art Gallery
1982
Hayward Annual, London
1977
Whitechapel Open, London
1974
'Art into Landscape', Serpentine Gallery, London
1972
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
1971
City of London Festival
1968
Artist's International Association, London
1967
First Edinburgh Open

Selected Collections:
The City of London, The Parnham Trust, Texaco Oil, Wiggins Teape
Demarco European Foundation
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Unlike many of the artists currently living and working in the Cornish district of Penwith, Stuart Knowles was born in Cornwall. After studying at the Slade and travelling for two years in Europe, he remained working in London, during which time he established his career, exhibiting in shows at The Serpentine, Hayward and Whitechapel art galleries. In 1988 he returned to Cornwall and continued to nurture the strong roots in the Cornish landscape that informs much of his work. Stuart has developed an abstracted form of lyrical and gestural painting that refers to the landscape without being representational in form. His work in recent years has been most clearly characterised by the use of a distinctive, elliptical format for his paintings and studies. The elliptical form refers, in part, to the influence of enclosures, settlements, stone circles, shields, and most frequently, the bay - which is itself a form of settlement or enclosure. This circle, rendered in perspective, creates an arena or amphitheatre in which a dialogue between ideas and materials is either played or fought-out. Drawing on the combined influences of both the physical landscape and its cultural and mythological history, Stuart's elliptical works allow for a contemplation of form, space and time occupied within and across a landscape that is intimately observed and understood.
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Artist's Statement:is a language that nature itself throws up. Whilst we search for metaphor and symbol to understand, some configurations of elements conspire momentarily to clarify that language. At the very edge of land (at certain moments, in certain moods) there are times and places when we sense we have seen the very origins from which metaphor, symbol and myth derive. We experience these moments and, in our turn, participate in the continuum we share with the earliest of observers.