interview with artist Baxter Knowlton
Baxter Knowlton is a Little Rock artist originally from Mississippi. His goal is to create paintings that look truthful, believable, and real because he believes the world and the people in it have enough meaning and beauty on their own, without having to impose or invent any. More of Baxter’s work can be found at his website.
AAS: Baxter, are you an Arkansas native?
BK: I’m not an Arkansas native but have lived in Little Rock since 2002, so I feel like one now. I grew up in Oxford, Mississippi and later in Jackson. I got an English degree from Yale and then bounced around for a few years, living in New York, Oxford, and Jackson, until I made it to Little Rock. I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else in my life now. I loved it here from the first time I visited. It’s southern but has a different feel from the deep south of Mississippi, and the civic pride and energy here have always struck me. The art scene is thriving and supportive. I love the people.
My wife was born and raised here and it’s my daughter’s hometown. My dad and stepmother moved here a few years ago. In a way it’s a homecoming for us, since the family actually started out in Desha County, Arkansas before some of them crossed the river to Mississippi around 1900. Turns out there are Knowltons all over Arkansas. It took a while, but I root for the Razorbacks even when they play Ole Miss. I still love Mississippi deeply though and am proud to be from there.
AAS: Was art something you were exposed to growing up? Did you have any artist role models?
BK: I didn’t appreciate or realize it as a kid, but art was everywhere. When I was six my mom, Miriam Weems, went back to school at Ole Miss to study interior design. After taking a required studio art class, she started painting and over the next 30 years became a well-known artist in Mississippi. So, there was always art around, art students in and out of the house, art books, going to museums on trips, discussions of models and shows. It was taken seriously as something you could do. She and my dad collected art from other students and painters in Mississippi like Marie Hull, Jere Allen, Kay Child, and Frank Neal. Theora Hamblett lived around the corner from us. My great aunt on my dad’s side, Emma Lytle, was a well-known painter and sculptor who lived and worked in Perthshire, Mississippi in the delta. My paternal grandmother Martha had a print of Matisse’s Nasturtiums with the Dance in her hallway, which made a big impression on me as a child. I still see Matisse as a hero. From what I know of his life, painting was difficult for him, compared to a prodigy like Picasso. I tend to gravitate towards painters who struggle and paintings that show signs of that — painterly, awkward paintings with lots of corrections. Another hero is Lucian Freud, which may be obvious from my work and the amount of overpainting I do. I grew up drawing all the time.
I’ve been thinking about that time since I recently heard my childhood friend Brian Walker died last year. He was the best natural drawer I’ve ever seen. He was also a great musician and played bass in a band in Oxford called Wobbity. When we were little, we would make our own comic books full of people blowing away bad guys with Uzis and Mac 10s, special forces commandos rappelling out of Hueys, F-16s dogfighting, etc. It was the 80s. We would run around playing war in Faulkner’s Woods. A lot of our comics were based on a comic book series we loved called The Nam about Vietnam.
My high school art teacher Betty Mitchell was an amazing person. She gave me the freedom to do basically whatever I wanted. I had a drawing and painting professor in college named Robert Reed who was also a huge influence. He was an abstract painter, but it was mainly his attitude that has stuck with me and that I try to live up to. He talked a lot about “hardcore looking,” a phrase he used to describe being able to tell exactly which branch is in front of another branch in a drawing of a tree, where chair legs intersect, and exactly how something was built. Above all it meant getting past your own preconceptions of what something looks like to see what’s really there. I think about him when I want to be lazy and fudge something in a painting. I think about Jere Allen talking about working every day and not just being a Sunday painter. I think about my mom working almost every day. It’s really the example of all these people—their keeping at it. I’ll leave a bunch of names off this list, but some other painters and photographers and potters I love, in no particular order are: Richard Diebenkorn, Lucy MacGillis, Stanley Lewis, Frank Auerbach, Chaim Soutine, Brian Rego, Jess Biggs, Younghee Choi Martin, Kevin Kresse, John Kushmaul, Sara Lee Roberts, William Eggleston, Larry Labatte, Jason Bouldin, Carlyle Wolfe Lee, Ann Gale, Perrion Hurd, Kelly Edwards, Noah Saterstrom, Willem de Kooning, Rackstraw Downes and Jose Eidelman.
AAS: You are known for your portrait work, so I want to start off with that. One of my absolute favorites is Alfonso. The lighting is extraordinary. And it is more than just a portrait, it is a story of the two of you, really – the interactions between the two of you.
Alfonso, 24” x 24”, oil on canvas
BK: Thank you. The subject matter helped a lot in that painting. Alfonso Flores is an extraordinary man. His whole family is. I’m hesitant to say this because he might get even busier than he already is, but if you need any carpentry or work done on your house, call him. I used to live on Battery St. and bought a boarded-up house across the street that I was going to use as my studio and may still someday. He was renovating it for me and I took a photograph of him in the backyard one morning that that painting’s based on. You can see a stack of 2 x 4’s lying on the ground behind him in the lower right corner. He has a calmness, kindness, and good-humoredness that I hope comes through in the painting.
AAS: Katherine is quite a different portrait. It is her in the moment captured with extraordinary skill. Tell me about it.
Katherine, 40” x 30”, oil on canvas
BK: Thank you. Neither Alfonso nor this painting were commissions, but things I painted for myself. The subject Katherine is a talented writer and editor from Little Rock. That was painted in my old studio on 17th St. near Central High, which had different light than anywhere else I’ve worked. My old dog Bella is sleeping in front of her. I feel like her hands turned out well in that one, and I was able to get a likeness while keeping her face simple and not overworked. I didn’t try to paint every detail of her dress, which I’m glad about. That’s the great temptation when working from digital photos—to try to paint every hair and leaf and detail when we don’t normally see any of that in real life. Working from photographs versus from life is one of the biggest divides in painting to me, and biggest determinants of what a painting ends up looking like. I’m not against working from photographs at all, but like to work from life too because it’s so different.
AAS: You mentioned commissions. What do you find most satisfying and frightening about commissions?
Christ Our Intercessor, 40” x 30”, oil on canvas
BK: It’s satisfying to create something that people live with and that has meaning for them. I know what it’s like to grow up with, live with, and love paintings for decades and have them be a fundamental part of your life and memories. It’s an honor to think I might produce something that plays a similar part in other people’s lives. And doing commissions lets me tackle subject matter I wouldn’t normally paint.
I’m not sure I’d call it frightening, but I do worry about not getting a good likeness, and the client not truly loving the painting. There’s a responsibility I feel to honor the subject. I recently did a portrait of Christ for Christ Episcopal Church in downtown Little Rock. I had long wondered how you could approach religious subject matter in a contemporary way, without that cartoonish, gauzy light that modern narrative paintings can get for some reason—where the image is at a remove or distance, and has a sort of film over it, that makes it look unreal to me. There’s a lack of immediacy. Anyway, it was a fascinating challenge to try to figure out how to paint Christ.
AAS: How do you approach a portrait? Is the style you use a result of collaboration with the subject or is it your choice based on a reaction you have after meeting the person?
BK: I’ve always thought that style is less chosen than people think; that it chooses you or forces itself on you. I read a quote once by some painter saying that if he could paint differently, he surely would. I do try to pare down my palette as much as possible. As much as I can I try to mix everything from three colors plus white. Most of the natural world outside of things like flowers isn’t that bright, and my favorite and I think most accurate portraits are simple in terms of color. I used to use a much brighter palette and struggled to control it, though I think I’ve learned how to do that now.
When I’m painting from life it’s almost always a friend or family member who’s giving me time, and I want them to be as comfortable as possible holding a pose, so I let them largely dictate that. You also discover that a lot of people can’t sit still. It’s not easy to do. In most of the portrait commissions I have to rely on photographs because people can’t or don’t have the time to sit for them. If the client has a photograph he or she particularly likes, I’ll certainly use that. I often try to take the photographs myself, indoors in indirect natural light, since that seems to distort the colors the least. Photos taken outdoors on sunny days have shadows that always look black, which of course isn’t how they look in real life. So, it is a collaboration, either from letting the live model pick his or her own pose or working together to choose the image or images to use for a commissioned painting. When working from photos, there’s almost always one that will stand out as the obvious choice, either because it’s more interesting somehow or conveys something essential visually. And I am always asking clients if they want something changed. Either way, I’ll usually start with a drawing of some sort to figure out the composition and where things are on the canvas, sometimes an underpainting too, to nail down the drawing further. But sometimes it’s just a wash of color to block things in.
AAS: In the Wilson Portrait, like in Alfonso and Katherine, the setting and the way you capture it is such an important element in helping the viewer get to know these people. It is masterfully done. They must have been happy with the way it turned out.
Wilson Portrait, 60” x 36”, oil on canvas
BK: That’s my aunt and uncle, Dick and Lester Senter Wilson, in the house where my mom’s family still meets for Christmas near Belhaven College in Jackson. My mom always called it a time capsule. It was built in the 50s and still has the shag carpeting you can see in the painting and mid-century furniture, paneling, built ins, and other details that haven’t been changed. My aunt and uncle are both gone now. She was a professional opera singer. They were larger-than-life people, and I hope that came through. It’s a big canvas. They were happy with it, I think. It’s now hanging at the Opera Mississippi office in Jackson. The dog on the right is my cousin Frank’s hunting dog Maggie, who was an amazing dog.
AAS: What I love about your paintings is that they can look so different – very realistic to more impressionistic. Do you find that working in oil makes transitioning from one style to another easier or have you just always worked in oil?
BK: I’ve always worked in oil, and was taught in that medium, though I’m thinking about trying to use acrylics more in the future. Acrylics dry almost instantly unless you add a medium to them, while oils can stay wet for days or longer depending on the color. So, you can change things a lot easier with oils. I recently took a watercolor class at the AMFA taught by Sarah Lassiter, a wonderful teacher. I loved trying a new medium I have almost no experience with. I was inspired by watching my father-in-law, David Cowan, an incredible watercolorist, who needs to be shown, and recognized and wanted to try it too. He’s started doing watercolors after a long architecture career. Both acrylics and watercolors especially force you to think in a different way and be more tolerant of putting the paint down and leaving it alone. I do leave some paintings less finished than others, painted very quickly, while others I work on forever and just have to abandon at some point.
AAS: One of my most favorite landscape paintings is Audubon Landscape. I just love your loose rendering of the landscape. Tell me about it.
Audubon Landscape, 20” x 30”, oil on canvas
BK: That was at the Audubon Delta bird sanctuary off Springer Blvd. in Little Rock, which my wife’s cousin Jenny told us about a few years ago. After years of not knowing it existed, I started going there for a while to draw and paint. It’s one more example of the cool things Little Rock has. Their yearly “Swift Night Out” and spring and fall native plant sales are both wonderful. I don’t paint outside a lot but it’s a whole different animal and makes me feel like a real painter. You have to go to some trouble, lug stuff out there, get a little hot or cold, deal with bugs or wind, and wonder where a bathroom is. But it forces you to move faster since everything’s changing—the light, the way plants have grown overnight, other people walking by.
AAS: You painted a wonderful Self Portrait a few years ago. I was wondering what it reveals about you and how you have evolved as an artist technically and in your ability to capture the spirit of the person you are painting?
Self Portrait, 12” x 12”, oil on canvas
BK: Thanks. My hair has definitely evolved to be more gray, but that’s more fun to paint than brown. I used to do more self-portraits than I have recently, and still have a bunch stashed around the house, a lot of them unfinished sketches. It’s a good way to practice, and a free model. I don’t have to worry about whether the sitter is getting tired or annoyed, or whether it’ll hurt his feelings if it doesn’t look like or flatter him. I tend to emphasize the “flaws” anyway, or at least try not to edit anything out. But I felt like that painting did end up looking like me, and the drawing was pretty good. Measuring distances and comparing colors is harder looking at yourself in a mirror. I’m usually so focused on the technical aspects of a painting, I tend to let the meaning of the work or subject’s spirit be whatever it’s going to be and take care of itself. I’ve been told that I look mad in self-portraits, but that’s because I’m concentrating and, like old photos, you can’t smile for that long. Each viewer will see something different anyway. Subject matter is important, but what moves me in paintings is often more some formal quality—a color or a brushstroke or a bit of drawing or a buildup of paint—whatever it is. A lot of it can’t be put into words. I’ve developed a tighter, more precise style over the years, can draw better, and understand color a lot better than I used to. Skin is a lot more neutral and gray than I used to paint it—most things in nature are. I’m still amazed by how much you can do with just burnt sienna, ultramarine blue, and white. Using a limited palette helped a lot with understanding how much color temperature and value contribute to something looking real. Limits are actually very freeing, even self-imposed ones. Painting in a realistic or representational way is a limit in itself.
AAS: What can we expect next from you, Baxter?
BK: I’ll probably be focusing more on gallery shows than commissions. I want to move in a more expressive, gestural, abstract direction, use a brighter palette again, paint more quickly, and do more landscapes and still life – maybe more animals too, like the egrets and snake in the painting I recently did for the local interior designer Tom Chandler. This is going to sound simple, but I had a realization one day that you can let a painting be a painting and not try to make it something it’s not, a photograph. I think a lot about the level of finish a painting should have, and how much detail to try to include. and when to know it’s done. There’s a real satisfaction when you finally get a detail exactly right, exactly the way it is. But that can happen very quickly. I’m going to keep working at watercolor and try acrylics again too. I think I’ll still be learning how to do all of this the rest of my life.
Thank you so much for asking me to do this interview. I also always want to thank Campbell McCool and his wife Leighton in Taylor, Mississippi for getting me my first solo show in Oxford long ago. Marcy Fischer Nessel of Fischer Galleries in Jackson for all her help over the years, and Del Boyette and Angela Alexander. And thank my beautiful wife Sarah for her encouragement and support; for posing for me, and for her honest critiques.
