One unusually balmy day in mid-March, I found myself ambling about the east end of Toronto. The Dundas and Carlaw intersection that I was unsuccessfully trying to navigate is home to the p/m gallery, home to Powell, a rising young local art dealer. After some minutes of aimless wandering, I finally found the elusive gallery and was greeted by the dark-haired dealer, known only by her last name. Pleasantries were exchanged and the necessary perusal of p/m’s current exhibit done, but we both knew that I was there to meet Powell’s protégée, innovative and precocious painter Meg McKnight.
Somewhat of a wanderer, McKnight informed me that she has held four different jobs (all in the floral or gardening industry) and occupied three different dwellings since she received her visual studies and English degree from U of T last year.
“I’m not a very goal-oriented person, which has caused me mental stress at times-and certainly financial stress,” she notes dryly.
Then again, McKnights philosophy of education is quite different from the mentality of those bent-for-success types intent on grabbing their pre-med or pre-law diploma.
“It’s not [just] training,” she says, referring to school. “I would have gone to college or vocational school if I had [simply] wanted to get a job.”
McKnight’s entire approach to getting things done is rather happenstance. For instance, she managed to sneak her way into a solo show at p/m without even submitting her portfolio when Powell herself visited the visual arts faculty’s fourth-year thesis show, in which McKnight’s work was displayed.
It was love at first sight. Powell simply glows when she describes her reaction to McKnight’s work.
“Meg’s work stood out so much beyond everyone else’s,” Powell says with much excited gesturing. “There was a finished quality to it, a tightness that a lot of student work really lacks.”
Powell was even more impressed when she discovered that McKnight’s time was divided between two completely different disciplines.
“If she could paint that well while she was learning old bloody English, I wanted to see what she could do when she focused,” Powell exclaims. “I pretty much put [her paintings] up on the wall, loved them, and told her I would love to show her work if she could get me some new material.”
McKnight’s style was distinctive from the beginning, thanks to her unique practice of applying lush oil paint directly onto the canvas with piping bags (like those used to decorate cakes with icing). However, as Powell notes, McKnight’s style has matured post-thesis. She began to build up the layers in her paintings, and to incorporate more of the tiny, intricate elements that have led some observers to compare her work to underwater landscapes.
“The standard reply is ‘jellyfish,'” McKnight quips. However, it is the tensions between these delicate elements-or the “drama,” as Powell refers to it-that “keeps her work from sliding over to the side of decoration. It displays intuitive thought; you can see that she’s working with the paint as it comes out.”
McKnight cites Toronto artist Michael Adamson as the inspiration for her unconventional painting style. She describes a show she saw in which he used “paint buttons”-generous dollops of paint squeezed right out of the tube and onto the canvas.
She also offers her childhood experience as a possible muse: “I’m emotionally attached to visual experiences like the beach and rock hunting,” she explains, but is quick to add that those experiences are relegated to the cobwebbed corners of her mind while she paints. “I don’t really impose images onto the canvas-I just let the paint flow, which speaks to the organic nature of the work. Each element builds on itself, and the painting unfolds as it goes.”
Not only did McKnight score a solo show straight out of school (and receive a glowing review of that show from the Globe and Mail), she’s so damn good that her old professors, experienced artists themselves, are actually purchasing her art. One of her major works from the p/m show, Teeming Bryozoan, was bought by U of T professor Otino Corsano. Joan Tod, another visual arts instructor, also owns a few of McKnight’s works. McKnight praises her old teachers as great sources of learning and experience, but gives the visual arts program itself a slightly less radiant review. She maintains that it’s “under-represented, under-funded, under-everything,” but notes that the shoddy studio space actually helps to spawn the flexibility that comes in handy when a starving artist such as herself needs to get creative with finding-or creating-her own studio space.
There was an extra bounce in my step as I left the p/m gallery a few hours later. McKnight’s bohemian success story and carefree, take-it-as-it-comes approach to her art and life suffused me with giddiness, rare for a jaded Torontonian whose inner eccentric had been mercilessly quashed by teachers and parents alike. All of us here at U of T can learn a lesson from this up-and-coming young artist-do what you dare, and the rest will follow.
