TOM KNECHTEL The Hare in the Studio

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present a selection of recently completed works on paper by acclaimed Los Angeles based artist Tom Knechtel.  Known for his complex allegorical narratives, Knechtel has often employed a cast of human and animal characters to draw parallels between man and beast.  This exhibition focuses on the hare and its relationship to the artist, its human counterpart and sometime alter ego. 
 
The hare, as with other animals in Knechtel’s oeuvre, is an enigmatic and malleable vessel of meaning.  Hares, which live alone or in pairs, are full of suggestiveness and possibilities as actors on Knechtel’s  “stages”.  In this series of somewhat autobiographical drawings, the hare might inhabit the artist’s studio populated by images of the artist’s past work, loves, and obsessions.   In other works, the hare, with its wild eyes and elongated snout, appears alone in the woods or simply staring forth from an otherwise blank page. 
 
Knechtel has utilized a myriad of materials including pastel, graphite, ink, drypoint, and silverpoint to shift the meaning and texture of his images.  In the case of the silverpoints, a medium favored during the Renaissance in which a silver stylus makes precise marks on prepared paper, images appear as simultaneously concise and at a distance, due to the delicate tonality and exactitude of the marks.  This medium seems appropriate for images of the artist’s past as we remember our past in fleeting details.  In some drawings, images are broken up among several pieces of paper which act as a doorway into the studio or as a multipart narrative arching over the artist’s head.