Tom Knechtel

Art Brokerage: Tom Knechtel American Artist: Tom Knechtel has a "fascination with the fantastic" and paints with watercolor, gouache and oil, and does collages---all with a goal of getting people to suspend their disbeliefs. His current style of work, which he began in 1986, and which is mostly done with oil paint, is large scale and developing of allegorical themes through portraits of animals in exploration of the human experience. Reoccurring themes are his childhood memories, homosexual desires, nature, Russian folklore, and Indian mythology. His pieces are highly detailed and "teem with strange menageries of creatures engaged in enigmatic dramas." He compares his work to an "imaginary theater company" and populates it with a "repertory of actors" such as dogs, bears and birds. Much of it seems stream of consciousness as though it unfolds on its own. He layers sections of panel or canvas with many finely detailed, seemingly unrelated images, often with blank spaces between them. Influences on his painting are his love of theatre, especially the stylized Japanese Kabuki and Bunraku, and films including silent ones of the 20s and 30s and productions of Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa. Knechtel works out of a home studio. He was born in Palo Alto, and in the early 1970s, moved to Valencia and attended the California Institute of the Arts where he earned B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees. For 21 years, he worked as a newspaper ad designer and later took a teaching job at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Settling in southern California, he says he is very comfortable in the Los Angeles area because "it gives him space to be an oddball". This independence was especially important to him when he began doing figurative and fantasy subjects at a time when the New York dominated art world was totally into Abstract and Conceptual Art. Listings wanted.