Sweetness ^ light Stephen Knapp’s colorfully curious, dramatic installations are rooted in glass
Anyone who has ever squinted at colorful neon lights or created an abstract picture in the mind’s eye will appreciate the work of Massachusetts glass artist Stephen Knapp.
His “Lightpaintings” — bursts of color and shadow that extend beyond their frames and onto the walls where they are hung — are dramatic and unusual creations in the medium of glass.
Hawk Galleries is featuring 11 of Knapp’s light- based installations. The Downtown gallery has blocked off windows in order to control the light and show the pieces to their best effect.
At night, though, the gallery’s Main Street window is clear so that viewers from the street can enjoy “Standing Yellow,” an installation with 12 glass shapes shooting off rays of yellow, red, green and blue.
Knapp, who will turn 70 on Oct. 15, began his artistic life as a photographer. For the past 30 years, he has been working with light.
For his lightpaintings, he starts with dichroic glass ( which can display different colors in different lighting situations), cutting it into a variety of shapes. He selects as many as a dozen shapes and attaches them to a white panel with stainlesssteel brackets of his own making. Each panel is lit with a halogen bulb, allowing the colors to shoot out in rays and spears. The brackets create subtle, abstract shadows of their own.
“Advocate Harbor,” measuring 36 inches by 24 inches, projects fuchsia and yellow rays onto a wall and up toward the ceiling, extending the work’s measurements to 11 feet by 10 feet.
One of the most colorful installations is “No Boundaries,” a vertical field with a riot of red, aqua, orange and yellow rays emanating from its center.
Some of the works have minimal color. “Dark Victory” offers only slivers of blue, yellow and purple, and “Turmoil” becomes a study in shades of white, cream and gray.
But the most dramatic works are those that seem to want to reproduce the glories of the rainbow. “April’s Child” — might it have been titled for that rainy month? — revels in a palette of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet.
Knapp describes what he works in as “an ‘Oh, wow’ medium.”
“But I’d like people to go beyond the ‘Oh, wow’ and see the paintings,” he said. “I’m an abstract painter in light, and light is such an important part our lives.”
Knapp’s installations seem to want to burst out from the walls upon which they hang and go large. It’s no surprise, then, that the artist has created several monumental outdoor pieces, including “Luminous Affirmations” — 80 feet by 60 feet — on the City Hall building in Tampa, Florida.
It’s worth a Google search.