Michael Knowlton: Blackwater Babylon

A Grand Central Press release: the full color, hardcover, 33-page book, Blackwater Babylon, featuring the recent artwork of artist Michael Knowlton. This publication represents the Grand Central Art Center exhibition curated by Mitchell De Jarnett and contains essays by Nathan Spoor, C.R.Stecyk, and Jerome Witkin. Michael Knowlton is an artist involved in the lowbrow art scene as a writer for Juxtapoz and an early exhibitor in Zero One Gallery. His recent paintings are politically charged comments on current events and the war in Iraq, inspired by news broadcasts on TV and in newspapers, photojournalistic scenes, and the artist's unique narrative. Michael Knowlton grew up in the Bay Area, painting hot rod t-shirts at fairs during his teens and studied art at San Francisco State University. He later went back to lowbrow and politically charged work in the early 90's focusing on oil use and other ecological themes infused with a film-noir quality. Recurring themes include burning palm trees, which resonate with the menace of arson and the faded California dream. He also has written for Juxtapoz magazine and Surfer's Journal for over ten years.

About the Author :
C.R. Stecyk III grew up in the Venice and Santa Monica areas of Los Angeles surrounded by ""car culture,"" as well as legendary surfers and board builders. His influences range from George Barris, ""Big Daddy"" Roth, and Von Dutch Howard to Dave Sweet, Dale Velzy, Miklos Dora and Greg Noll. Stecyk was involved with the founding of the Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions surf shop in Santa Monica, California. He began documenting the Dogtown scene in the mid 1970s and is perhaps best known as a documentary photographer, although he is also a writer, film maker, artist, and curator. His artwork has been shown internationally in museums such as MOCA in Los Angeles, CA; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD; The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; Fondazione La Triennale, Milan, Italy; Le Tri Postal, Lille, France; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland; and La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain. In 1993, he curated the highly successful exhibition, Kustom Kulture, at the Laguna Art Museum, which featured such seminal underground artists as Robert Williams, Von Dutch and Roth. Stecyk also organized Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing, was a founding member of the Juxtapoz magazine collective, and was the production designer and writer of the Sundance Film Festival award-winning 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. Jerome Witkin is recognized as one of the most formidable contemporary figurative painters. Critically, Jerome Witkin generates notable praise, as exampled by the L.A. Times citing his work to be "a break-through in post-Cold-War art." The San Francisco Chronicle's Kenneth Baker cites that "Witkin's only peer is Lucian Freud." Witkin is one of the finest realist painters working today "he stages pictorial dramas that grapple with contemporary historical crises and moral pressures, while offering a lavish physical display of his medium." Witkin's works can be found in the permanent collection of prominent museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.

Review :
"Mesopotamia never looked more unsettling than in Knowlton's characteristic impasto-highlighted ziggurats and his infinite horizons of glazed spatial tones, smoke, and fumes." -- C.R. Stecyk