'Blood, sweat and tears' that went into exhibit re-energize painter

By Mary Lee Pappas / Star correspondent

Posted: November 27, 2009 Indianapolis Star

Walter Knabe, known for his celebrity-favored wall coverings and fabrics, gets back to his painting roots in "New Paintings: A Shift in the Paradigm," an exhibit at the Evan Lurie Fine Art Gallery in Carmel.

"I think it's the bravest thing I've done," Knabe says of the 22 works of art he created over the past year, which helped to restore his painting mojo. "I feel like I've been blocked for quite a number of years with the painting."

Retaining his soothing palette (Knabe makes his own paints), he obstructs his iconic and refined imagery of queens, Buddhas and floras with jarring swaths of abrasively applied paints. Irreverently dynamic, it's somewhat risky for a man who has made a comfortable name for himself in the fine-art world.

"Brown Muse," for example, features a young royal flanked in his Fairfield wall treatment juxtaposed with a small square of idiosyncratic flowers that are at once abstract and pretty. The dichotomy is rampant in this cohesive and exceptional grouping.

"It was out of my comfort zone. Some of it was blood, sweat and tears, it really was. Now I feel like I'm on this rocket ship that's taken off," he says of his creative resurrection. "It's going to continue. It's going to become a bigger part of what I do."

Originally from Cincinnati, Knabe and his wife of 32 years, Cynthia, moved to New York City in the early 1980s, where he silk-screened for Andy Warhol. For the past 15 years, he has called Indianapolis home.

Knabe, who started his career as a painter, says the work in his current exhibit embodies his art-making repertoire.

"You can see some fragment left from every period I've painted. Splatters from college, staining from when I lived in that loft, that's all culminated in these works. I feel like this work is picking up where I left off."

The last piece Knabe completed for this show is the most striking, a self-portrait titled "Real Home."

More than 12 layers of hand-painted and hand-screened imagery, riddled with personal symbology, produce a visually lyrical autobiography.

Chalk-like notes of New York and Indianapolis residences and studios linger to one side, while a bear, representing his daughter Anna, and a bunny, representing his daughter Gwen, mesh into the antiquated, fairy tale-like scene.

"I thought of my wife" in making the piece, Knabe said. "I realized the only person that's going to get this, the only person on this Earth is her, because she traveled that same journey with me."

Although it's a personal painting, Knabe says, people have responded to "Real Home." "I'm surprised people have responded to it so strongly. It just seemed strange, wild to do myself."

He approached this work with confidence, and had a blast doing it.

"Going, 'No you're not there yet, man. You're not quitting, you've got to go in and ruin it again,' " he playfully said, referring to his multiple screen maskings and layers of paint.