#3TheLIST: Books for your summer
Wherever your vacation takes you, Lumino shares with you the summer books you need to pack.
Book #3 ‘Lightpaintings, Stephen Knapp
Deriving inspiration from his studies of light, colour, dimension, space, and perception, artist Stephen Knapp has created an eighty-foot multi-dimensional composition of light in the Boise Art Museum’s Sculpture Court. The artist’s site-specific Lightpaintings embodies a unique and original form of art that integrates sculptural, architectural and visual elements to transform the environment.
This exhibition is the third exhibition featured in BAM’s Threads of Perception Series. Lightpaintings are an outgrowth of Knapp’s longtime interest in various media including photography, ceramics, and kiln-formed glass. In his work he achieves the perceptual presence of such artists as Robert Irwin and James Turrell.
Lightpaintings, Stephen Knapp
About Stephen Knapp
Stephen Knapp’s Lightpaintings are a new art form, a new beginning and the next step in the evolution of painting. Dispensing with traditional media and narrative content he is one of a small group of artists who work with light. Formed at the intersection of paintings, sculpture and architecture, his lightpaintings are intangible, multi-dimensional compositions of pure radiance making visible the light that surrounds us and transforming it into something physical yet inherently transcendental. In his lightpaintings Stephen Knapp creates destinations, a sense of place. Behind the lush colors and striking compositions underlies a serious exploration of space and dimension, light and color and perception that will forever change how we look at objects.
Lightpaintings are created by using a special glass treated with layers of metallic coatings that act as a selective prism to separate focused light into different wavelengths of the spectrum. Knapp cuts, shapes and polishes the glass in his studio to make a palette that he can use to refract and reflect light onto a surface and the surrounding space. Tailored to their immediate setting, Knapp’s lightpaintings embody an inherently unique and wholly original form of art that integrates sculptural, structural and purely visual elements into compositions that transform their environment and envelop the viewer in iridescent radiance.
The resulting creation displays abstract art’s affinity with music; the relationship of form, space and color akin to those of melody, time signature and harmony. Lightpaintings are in fact symphonies of color. Lightpaintings have been called “light sculpture”, “new media”, “kinetic” and much more as viewers try to describe this new medium.
Discover more about Stephen Knapp.
About the book
- Christopher Schnoor (author)
- Publisher: Stephen Knapp Studio (25 Sept. 2011)
- ISBN-10: 0979209811 Credits Christopher Schnoor
