“I have always been into art and drawing and coloring. There wasn’t a big art presence in my family. I remodeled houses for 15 years and had a surfboard company. About five years ago I jumped into it. I had five acres in Loxley and Hurricane Ivan blew down 13 pecan trees. I burned them several times, but it was a graveyard of trees. I found a piece that looked like an alligator head and the sculpture built itself. I built the alligator with Chris Cumbie and that was one of first things I made that I called art. I sold it in a gallery in Nashville and it was good to have a vision and come out with something that exceeded the vision. I am starting to let go of the fear of being an artist and have learned not to put things on pedestals. My family thought artists and musicians had to be gifted from birth and it was just something you did, but I am finding out that art is something you work at. All of our friends are artists and we learn from each other. I do screen printing because I like to learn processes that I can develop and then combine process together that creates something complex. I had to learn how to let go and that is when my work started getting better. I like participating in other people’s projects too. I don’t think any of my pieces have ever been finished. I just have to call them done and let them go. Sometimes pieces don’t come together and I have to call them backgrounds. I am working on a bunch of backgrounds right now. The urge to create haunts me. If I start enough pieces, then the individual ones won’t yell at me so much.”
Duane Knight
