Jas Knight: The Art of Quiet Moments
Photographs by Patrick Cline. Originally published in AphroChic magazine Issue No. 10.
One of the most powerful and impactful things about art is its ability to make us stop and consider small details — the little things that actually make up most of our lives. There are artists who take us to the extremes, past any comfortable sense of shape, dimension or texture. And there are those whose goal is to capture life so exactly that it’s hard to believe that what, or who, you’re seeing isn’t actually there. Then there are those whose work isn’t about a concept or an object, but a moment; the ones whose efforts draw you inexorably into a place of quiet contemplation because they show you a moment that you’ve seen before, you’ve lived it, but didn’t see it at the time in quite the same way. Capturing those moments on his canvas and creating those seconds of quiet for us is the work of painter Jas Knight.
Honored with inclusion in the US State Department’s Art in Embassies program, the Hartford, Connecticut native’s works are described by the program as, “studies in cultural history as well as in the tradition of portraiture itself. His portraits are suffused with a sense of dignity that recalls the formal portraiture of the seventeenth century.” Knight openly acknowledges the inspiration of “Old Masters,” such as 17th century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, and their shared vocation as “genre painters,” artists who focus their work on “mundane” scenes of daily life. However, Knight adds Gordon Parks and fellow Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts alum, Henry Ossawa Tanner, to the list of masters that he looks to.
The most striking quality of Knight’s work is the sense of quiet repose with which he imbues his subjects who are, in nearly all cases, Black women. This feeling of dignity, of self-possession in the women he paints — emphasized by the ornate, Baroque frames that he favors — is made all the more striking and endearing as our fight for better representation in art and other media continues to teach us that how we’re seen is just as important as how often. It was this same sense that the artist sought to convey in 2018, when, at the request of Yale University his subject became James W. C. Pennington, who, once enslaved, went on to become a pastor and abolitionist as well as the first African American to attend the university. “I wanted the viewer to feel as though he or she was meeting Pennington,” Knight says. “It was my goal to have his stance communicate dignity and self-determination because I felt these two traits fueled many of his efforts.”
Not content to make an impact only through his work, Knight looks to inspire others in their artistic journeys as well. He teaches courses at the Art Students League of New York on the trichromatic theory and its application to portraiture and the history and technique of reproducing the work of master painters, and has produced books on both topics. But whether he’s writing, teaching or painting, to Jas, the three are the same because they each further the commitment to art and beauty in life that have propelled him from the beginning.
“Most people have bifurcated their lives into categories of things they live to do and the work that makes those things possible,” he told the Philadelphia Art Museum. “As a painter I’ve taken the nearly disastrous gamble of not assuming the two of them to be mutually exclusive. As a child I marveled at the particles I could see floating in the air when the sun shone through a window. It is my belief that all of life can feel this transcendent. Music, architecture, taste, etc., are all things that we can use to evoke a sense of the transcendent.”
