Thomas McKnight's World: A Vision of Earthly Happiness
Sharp and jewellike, McKnight's silkscreen prints mirror his search for an earthly paradise. His is a cheerful, too tidy world where crescent moons peek through windows, lovers embrace by the Seine and windmills tower over white rooftops on the Greek isle of Mykonos. In this lavish, oversize volume, Cohen, a freelance curator, portentously compares McKnight's work to paintings by neo-expressionists, neo-classicists and Italian Renaissance masters. The artist's debt to naive or primitivist painting and to graphic illustration is ignored. With their deliberate childlike innocence and shimmering colors, his prints and etchings are largely nostalgic and sentimental in their appeal. The pictures are repetitious; a room interior in Coconut Grove looks pretty much like a room interior in Manhattan. His kitsch fantasies of Narcissus, Atlantis, sacred and profane love are fragmentary puzzles.Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.