Joshua Kight Exhibit in Scanlan Gallery

1/27/2017

St. Stephen’s is pleased to host a special exhibition of paintings by artist Joshua Kight. “The Great Plains Series: Meetings and Musings” will be on display from Monday, Feb. 13 to Friday, March 3 in the school’s Scanlan Gallery.

Originally from Virginia Beach, Va., Kight holds a B.S. in art education from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., and an M.F.A. in painting from The University of Texas at Austin. His work has been exhibited across Texas, and he has received numerous awards, including being named a Hunting Art Prize finalist in May 2009 and serving as a Marie Sharpe Foundation teacher-artist in residence in Colorado Springs, Colo., during the summer of 1997. He has taught drawing and painting courses since the 1980s. In addition to creating visual works, Kight is a published poet.

“The Great Plains Series: Meetings and Musings” will be on display in the Scanlan Gallery in the Helm Fine Arts Center on St. Stephen’s campus at 6500 St. Stephen’s Drive in Austin. An artist reception will be held on Sunday, Feb. 19 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Kight will give an Artist’s Talk and Poetry Reading at 5 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.

Scanlan Gallery hours are Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., by appointment and during events in the Helm Fine Arts Center. For more information, please contact Beatrice Baldwin at bbaldwin@sstx.org.

Artist’s Statement

“The Great Plains Series: Meetings and Musings” began with a Blood Moon. There was a particularly powerful version of it in 2014, when I woke my wife to look at it at 3 a.m. This vision, so warm and strong, imprinted itself on me. I began to pay attention to celestial events in art such as Van Gogh's "Starry Night,”' which is a touchstone for any painter. My first artistic processing of this was to paint an orange tabby with four eyes, representing an elevated or special sight with a Blood Moon outside the window. The heavens became a playground to invent in as I went. The painting that followed moved outside under the sky.

There was a dry creek bed that ran behind the house and coyote congregations convened once a week. Again I found myself awake at 3 a.m., as they sang their hymns to the skies. Their howls and yips were fascinating, like some kind of fearsome ecstatic language. It seemed that we were not separated at all from the wild but immersed in it.

Soon after, my wife and I took a trip in the Hill Country and saw bison that were beautiful in their cocoa brown coats. We saw deer, pronghorn, and even signs of bobcats. Modern life seemed like an illusion with its flat colors and commercial signs. I felt this “compression of time,” where the patterns and geometry of the “now” were projected on to and encircling the bodies of these original inhabitants of the plains.

Bison in subsequent paintings became like mystic visions of a metaphysical story with dances, deaths, resurrections and the examination of signs. Like the elders of the tribe, they have meetings and pacts where the fates are addressed. Opportunistic bobcats greedily grab whatever small creature is unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The latest piece in the puzzle is my examination of African masks, like many artists before me, and the morphing of these shapes on to the faces of the coyotes. The result makes the painted coyotes look the way they sound to me. There is a vestige of Van Gogh's stars in the sky with a few planets added for good measure.

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