Editor’s note: Airstream will host a fine art invitational exhibit of landscape art, May 31-June 5, at its headquarters in Jackson Center. This is one in a series of stories that will profile the artists whose work will be shown.
JACKSON CENTER — Dan Knepper, of Jackson Center, is the only local painter whose work will be included in the Airstream Fine Art Invitational exhibit later this spring.
And Knepper hasn’t been a painter all that long. His degree from Bowling Green State University was in glass blowing.
“I didn’t really know anything about painting. I started with watercolors in 2005,” he said recently.
As the art teacher in Botkins Local Schools, he had arranged for Jane Paul Angelhart to lead a workshop for his students.
“Her color palette was brilliant,” Knepper said. He was hooked.
He left teaching in 2014 to paint full time. His watercolors began to win awards: in local art shows, from the Ohio Watercolor Society, and nationally from Dick Blick and Daniel Smith art supply firms. They were finalists in the Richeson75 International and Art at the Arnold competitions. The award-winners are of people, often women, caught in reflective poses. The paintings pull viewers into them. They invite viewers to meet the subjects one-on-one, to become friends.
Knepper’s media expanded after he met oil painter Steven Walker at an art show in Worthington. The watercolorist was immediately impressed by Walker’s work.
“You can see right away (when you look at a painting) that he knows what’s what,” Knepper said. “Steven is technically brilliant.” Knepper signed up to take a Walker workshop and then arranged for the experienced painter to teach as a guest artist in Botkins.
“I went back a couple more times. Then he came to the house and we were painting together. He critiques my work still,” Knepper said. “I’m still learning. I always feel like I’m speaking English when I do a watercolor, but oils is like French.”
He tends to paint landscapes in oil; portraits and figures, in watercolor because he feels he hasn’t acquired the technique in oils yet to get the luminosity of skin tone he achieves with watercolor.
That luminosity, according to his son Jordan, also of Jackson Center, comes from a watercolor technique that is, itself, unusual.
“When you work with watercolors, you work fast. You put down a couple of layers. You don’t wait,” he said. “(Dad) doesn’t do that. He puts 50 layers on. The washes are so thin. Because they’re so thin and there are so many of them, he’s able to create more depth in his paintings. You can reach into the painting because it has that three-dimensional quality. He’s challenging people’s understanding of what you can do with watercolors.”
For the older Knepper, no matter what the medium, it’s all about light, color and composition rather than about a specific person or a specific place. He works almost exclusively in the studio from photographs.
“I watch the light. I run out the door, jump in the car and start taking pictures,” he laughed. The challenge he has set for himself is to get beyond recording on canvas and paper what he captures with the camera.
“Steven and Peter (Fiore) and Brent (Cotton, top landscape artists) have all reached that point and their artwork transcends what they’re painting. I’m working toward that. Mary Whyte (a well-known watercolorist) said, ‘Don’t be a journalist. Be a poet.’ When art passes beyond technique, it enters into the realm of magic. My goal is to find that place beyond reproduction. It want it to become poetry,” Knepper said. Another goal is, as a viewer, to become more accepting of abstract, conceptual art, which he admits to not appreciating much at all.
Jordan praised his father for continuing to learn and for teaching Jordan to be a lifelong learner in the arts, too. Knepper was Jordan’s first art teacher when Jordan was in elementary school; although, the son noted, he really started to learn about art at age 2, in his father’s glass-blowing studio at Bowling Green.
The most important thing son learned from father was as much a life lesson as an art lesson: “Try it. Don’t say you can’t do it until you’ve tried it,” Jordan said. “Don’t give up on it until you’ve given it your best shot. (And) he lives it. He isn’t going to shy away from something just because it’s hard. He left a well-paying job to become a full-time artist. There was no safety net, no wife at home (to pay the bills). That’s not shying away from something that’s going to be terrifying at times.”
Indeed, Knepper doesn’t shy away from challenges, whether the challenges are a new painting technique or finding selling opportunities.
Recently he has done a series of sunrise/sunset paintings in oil. They were started under Walker’s tutelage because Knepper wanted to learn to paint clouds. One of those paintings is up for auction on eBay. It’s a guerilla marketing tactic that Knepper has not tried before.
“I’m still trying to get the word out so more people see (my work),” he said. His art is also sold through galleries in Charleston, South Carolina, Morehead City, North Carolina, and Cincinnati and on his website, [email protected].
“When you put something in a gallery, you have to wait for it to sell,” he said. “They may promote their best-selling artists heavily and not get around to you. So I had to come up with ideas to get my name out there. It’s also interesting to see what people think a painting is worth.”
At press time, the eBay painting had been bid up to $610.
“In a gallery, it’s a $2,000 painting,” the artist said. He acknowledged that if the painting sells for less than $2,000, that doesn’t make it worth less. It means that someone, who can’t afford to spend $2,000, values the work enough to buy it at what he can afford to pay.
Knepper is also working on a series of paintings of old cars and trucks that he hopes people will buy as Father’s Day gifts.
When he’s asked what single work of art, of any ever created, he would like to own himself, he got teary-eyed for a moment thinking about Claude Monet’s waterlilies. But he doesn’t lean toward the old masters. He chooses, instead, his new masters.
“One of Peter Fiore’s ‘Tangled’ series,” Knepper said. “We have the same shared reverance for the woods. I think he’s got some other spiritual things going on in there that make it more than just a painting of a tree. He’s an amazing painter. And Steven will ask why I didn’t choose one of his paintings. I could, you know. They (Peter and Steven) are both brilliant.”
