Collect Art are pleased to announce the arrival of a new artist in town. ‘The One Man Show’ exhibition, due to take place on Friday 6th August from 6:30pm at Collect Art, will display some of Alan Knight’s finest pieces. An amalgam of Impressionism and Expressionism, the exhibition provides an inspiring end to the week.
"At the age of 17 I wanted to do Art, go to Art College, but my parents were dead against it. Nevertheless I applied to Bolton Art College to start a Foundation Course and was accepted. Parental pressure eventually won the day and I was persuaded to abandon any thought of an art career and settle down (“You’ll never make any money”) and take up a proper job. I started work for Manchester Council in the Direct Works Dept as an office boy and for three years I was utterly miserable.
However, during this period I had been learning the guitar and was running a folk club on High St in Central Manchester during the late 60’s. Later with my mates we formed a “jug band” called The Brownsville jug Band which developed to such an extent that at 20 myself and the four others went Professional and jacked in our jobs. Off we went to Sweden for 6 months, where we toured relentlessly only coming home when our visas ran out. We continued to work professionally back in the UK and I stayed with the band for a further 10 years. One of our agents in the early 70’s was Jasper Carrott, before he became famous, and it was he who suggested that we change our name to “Brownsville Banned“ because of some of the raw humour we employed in our sketches.
We did a bit of TV work including Opportunity Knocks with Hughie Green and appeared on Granada Reports and New Faces We made 2 albums: “In any Case” and “That’s Shoe Biz”.
By my early 30’s I had enough and gradually got back to my first love, painting. In 1989 I did a Foundation course at Salford University, which definitely gave me the determination and single mindedness needed to pursue a career as an artist.
Once I had completed the Foundation Course I started painting furiously and also developed a huge appetite for studying art, looking at all types, styles and era’s of visual creativity. This thirst of knowledge and passion is still with me today.
I painted abstract for about 10 years and made constructions and assemblages, but gradually what I could see around me began to assert itself more and more in my work. Abstraction had become a dead end.
I met my partner in 2000 and moved to Stockport. I painted in the box room and stored paintings in the loft. Then in 2003 I had the chance of a small studio in Vernon Mill, Stockport and since then my work has developed and matured into an amalgam of Impressionism and Expressionism, though it is the expressive side I feel will gradually assert itself in the years to come. I am still at Vernon Mill albeit a studio twice the size but given the fact that I am somewhat prolific I still have little space".
View further details on Collects Art's last exhibition with Malcolm Croft.
