Color Play
Audra Knutson — who works in weaving, painting, jewelry and poetry — has an art opening at LUN + OJO on Saturday (May 14)
AUDRA KNUTSON was walking along the Vista Verde Trail, peering over the edge of the gorge at the rocks scattered beneath her feet. She snapped a photo, as she does at the onset of most of her paintings. After, in her home studio up El Salto in Arroyo Seco, Knutson played with palette — turning the sage-green-brown and crisply-detailed vista into a pink and yellow and orange surprise. A total abstraction from the O.G. scene.
“They’re like asymmetric little portals that capture the feeling of being in a place and what I love about it,” said Knutson, who uses the egg tempera tints like a printmaker, as she used to be one. Back then, she only layered black and white into the linocuts, which were very narrative based. Presently, Knutson’s pieces are a fun and meditative exploration in color.
Her jewelry making follows that same playful intention. Like how the light skips and dances in the most recent stones — faceted rutilated quartz, tourmaline, peridot — that she set in brass, adding silver ring bands.
“The rings are designed so that the base behind the stone is cut out, so if you hold it up to the light, you can see the details in it,” said Knutson, who learned the craft in San Francisco, where she lived for nine years before moving to her almost-six-year-home of Taos. (Coming here — a place she feels destined to retire — was like a return to her early childhood growing up in the Four Corners area.)
The across-the-board artist, with her adventurous spirit centered on meticulous craft, is a self-proclaimed hermit who loves teaching herself new techniques. When the seed beads came falling from the sky after a friend’s mother liquidated her bead shop, Knutson drew out designs on graph paper, then worked on repeating patterns in the necklaces — what she calls “woven amulets” and
“heart protectors.”
A constant through all of it — the paintings, or jewels or even the poetry (like pigment-soaked stanzas obsessed with blue sky and dusk) — are the tiny weavings. This might be the medium Knutson is most known for. It’s a process she got into in San Francisco, which was solidified upon moving to Taos, where she got in with the family of weavers who used to own the nowclosed Weaving Southwest in Seco. She worked at the store overflowing with hand-dyed churro wool, and currently lives on their property.
Knutson whips up the weavings on her portable frame loom, working in series, as she likes to do with all mediums. Out of the 60 or so weavings she’ll show at the LUN + OJO opening on May 14, a group of the eight series have an all black with funky rainbow spectrum shapes in them.
“One set is definitely influence by looking at the mesa and the mountains,” said Knutson, who works under self-guided parameters, like limiting colors. It’s been three years since her last show at Revolt Gallery.
“I haven’t had the experience of seeing them all together yet,” Knutson said of her new weavings. “Normally, they just get thrown in a box.”