Just a Dreamer Describing His World

Tom Knechtel has the vague air of a European professor with his tossed-about hair, rumpled clothes and generous girth. His sentences lilt upwards, making him sound as though he is perpetually speaking in interrogatory mode. He is articulate, cheery, and not at all the sort that one might think of as, well, preoccupied with sex.

The artist, 49, gives out a Rabelaisian guffaw when the topic is broached. Among the myriad fantastical images that populate his paintings, things erotic or at least suggestive are constantly making cameo appearances. Knechtel says, “People feel surprised by the sex. I don’t use it to get attention. It is part of my language of describing the world.”

Knechtel employs the refined color and lapidary detail of Indian miniature painting, the flattened perspective of Asian and medieval art, and the draftsmanship of the Renaissance masters to concoct his own garden of earthly delights. The resulting paintings are stream-of-consciousness dreamscapes.

The combination of his technical gifts and his paintings’ outrageous surreality has garnered popularity with curators, collectors and critics. Michael Darling wrote in the New Art Examiner, “In his jewel-like passages of brilliant animals, humans, and imagined characters, Knechtel assembles a hodgepodge of unsanctioned activities that seek to expose the ignored dark side present but obscured in us all.”

Knechtel’s recent works--most of them already spoken for by a waiting list of fans--go on view Wednesday at Grant Selwyn Gallery in Beverly Hills.

“On Wanting to Grow Horns,” a mid-career survey of his work, from 1979 to 2001, is on view April 21 to July 14 at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Organized by Anne Ayres, director of the Ben Maltz Gallery at Los Angeles’ Otis College of Art and Design, it comes to that institution in the fall.

“He is inevitably seen as an idiosyncratic voice within the West Coast Surrealist tradition,” she says, “but more fruitfully, he could be viewed as a sophisticated and quintessential artist of Postmodern abundance. I see his paintings as open-ended dramas of desire, melancholy, skepticism and, not the least, laughter.”

One of the drawings meant for the Grant Selwyn show hangs on a studio wall at his modest Atwater home: a self-portrait of the artist, tummy protruding, sprawled on an armchair wearing large glasses and staring, world weary, at thought bubbles floating away. He’s nude, and a certain private body part has been rendered as a sapling putting forth leaves.

But most of his works are much more mysterious. A large, magenta painting, “A Mare’s Nest,” portrays a beefy, middle-aged man who is naked but for the stays of a formal skirt. Knechtel says, “Rather than perfect fantasy bodies, I became more interested in my body and the bodies of men I knew. He has the quality of an Everyman.”

In contrast to the nakedness of the subject’s body, the head is wreathed in tiny images painted with the most painstaking care: the side streets of Los Angeles, fairy-tale characters, wasps and birds with fruit, goats wearing jewels, and many male wrestlers.

Above the man’s head hovers a world that is even more condensed and crowded with random scenes, including an urn splashing what Knechtel explains is green perfume into the man’s teacup. A singing man pulls his skirts apart suggestively; various booths sell ice cream. There is a temple with animated guardian dogs and a tailor shop at the side where a skirt is being sewn. A scruffy crow at the bottom of the painting appears to be telling the whole story in a maze of delicate lines.

Knechtel explains, “I wanted all that highly colored promiscuousness to be the world that holds onto the man and suggests experiences that he is not able to absorb. ‘Mare’s-nest’ is an old-fashioned term for something that is purported to be wonderful but evaporates upon further examination.”

Little visual stories proliferate all around the canvas, but there is no singular narrative thread. A viewer is left to muse and wonder, just as the painter had done.

“I don’t know what a painting is about when I start,” Knechtel says. “As I’m working, it changes as meaning accumulates.”

It is time-consuming to take in Knechtel’s painting, and a magnifying glass would not be amiss. They are time-consuming to produce, as well. “The Mare’s Nest” took a year and a half to complete.

In a way, with all the Lilliputian figures and activities, the act of viewing feels somewhat akin to the process of reading. The artist, who has read Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” in all of its various English translations, is passionate about literature. A few years ago, he painted his self-portrait as a middle-aged Scheherazade, spinning tales of personal fantasy.

“I’m interested in the work having the same quality as the way I think,” he adds. “Contradictory, with many points of view at once, many stories and ideas banging up against each other. I don’t think of my work as allegorical.”

Knechtel’s work has much in common with the artists who were his earliest influences, including William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch. “They are the epitome of artists who go into their own universes and make their own languages,” he says.

In addition, Knechtel’s art is rooted in his first love, which was theater. As a child growing up in the Northern California town of Mountain View, he made his own stuffed animals. They were given roles in stories that he composed and staged.

His father, an engineer for NASA, and his mother, a housewife, were charmed by his youthful talent. They were patient with him when he refused to take his SATs because he said Blake wouldn’t have taken them. He told his parents that instead of going to college, he would open a store and sell his toys. They agreed to this plan, so, after high school graduation in 1970, Knechtel went into business. By August, he was bankrupt. In September, he enrolled at the local junior college, where he took his first art course.

A couple of years later, his mother read an article about CalArts. The then-fledgling college required no SATs or grades; students were admitted strictly on the basis of their portfolio.

Knechtel sent the college his journal of drawings and paintings, and was admitted in 1972, “knowing absolutely nothing about art,” he says.

Initially, Knechtel created miniature theaters, but a teacher told him, “You either need to learn to draw or learn to make this ugly stuff look interesting.”

Given his talent as a draftsman today, it is surprising to hear that Knechtel didn’t learn to draw until college.

He used Renaissance art as his model, and began creating realistic yet dreamy pictures of figures and animals, often in juxtaposition, which can be seen as forerunners of his work today.

For Knechtel, who was open about his homosexuality, the school’s Feminist Art Program was an important influence because of “its emphasis on the personal and finding one’s own language to express experience.” At the time, it was out of fashion to paint in the figurative mode, but teachers in the Feminist Art Program refuted such restrictions. “They gave us permission to find our own path,” he recalls. “A sense of how you have to keep rethinking your work helped my drawing tremendously.”

After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in fine arts in 1976, Knechtel took a break from art. He worked for a year and a half cleaning houses, saved money and then left for a seven-month tour of Europe. His first in-depth experience of the Italian Quattrocento artists and those of the Northern Renaissance proved invaluable. “It made me more aware of the real presence of a real work of art,” he says.

He returned to live in San Francisco in 1978 and returned to making drawings, but he felt L.A. to be a more supportive art community, and he moved here in 1980. Once in L.A., he was inspired by the success of artist friends such as Lari Pittman and Roy Dowell, whom he knew from CalArts.

Having mastered drawing and watercolor, he moved on to the demanding medium of oil paint. For several years, he struggled to find a balance between his love of detail and line and the challenge of organizing the space of a large canvas.

He turned to Indian, Japanese and medieval art and its creative use of flattened perspective. “Art made before the invention of perspective seems more appealing to me,” he says. “Western space feels like a straitjacket.”

(In 1994, this integration of the Eastern aesthetics and Western talent would earn him a fellowship from the J. Paul Getty Trust. He traveled to Japan to study Kabuki and India to study Kathakali theater.)

Although he taught at various art colleges, he has found it less stressful to work full-time designing ads for LA Weekly. Yet he is disciplined about using his free days to paint: “I feel like I have to make meaning while I’m here in the studio.”

By the late ‘80s, he had had exhibitions at various L.A. galleries and was shown in New York as well. In 2000, his first museum show, “‘The Infant Griffin’ and Other Recent Drawings,” went up at the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, and he linked up with Grant Selwyn last year.

As he has gained confidence, his paintings have grown in complexity.

“I felt there were too many generalizations in my work,” Knechtel says, “and I began gradually to name my experiences more specifically. Not just sex but more humor, more vulgarity, more the way my thinking works. Part of my feeling was that in order to describe what it was like to be in my skin, I had to say what my sexuality was.”

Pausing for emphasis, he says, “A gay person looks at heterosexual art and translates. If I explain my experience honestly, it seems there is more chance that another person will be able to respond honestly.”

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TOM KNECHTEL, “A Mare’s Nest, a Talking Flounder and Other Follies,” Grant Selwyn Fine Art, 341 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills. Dates: Wednesday to March 16. Admission: Free. Phone: (310) 777-2400.

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Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is finishing a book on Georgia O’Keeffe.