About
Peter was born in 1960 in Detroit, Michigan. He discovered his passion for creative expression when he began training as a professional chef in his early 20s. His fascination with color, texture, composition, and balance influenced menu design and meal presentation in gourmet restaurants where he cooked for the most discerning customers (Detroit, Texas, Lake Tahoe Nevada and California) all the way to his own kitchen.
In the summer of 2002 while visiting Aix-en-Provence with his family he took an open-air painting class and was hooked. Trodding the path of impressionists of yore, at a tiny art store in Aix he loaded up on art supplies and painted nearly every day after that. Back home in the Bridle Trails neighborhood of Kirkland, he began experimenting in his barn, quickly converted to his art studio, using different mediums—oil, acrylic, ink—much as he had as a chef – to find new compositions, textures and color combinations. After moving to Paris in 2009, Peter joined an atelier with artists from around the world until he departed for Seattle in 2012, continuing to paint and sculpt. Returning to Paris in 2016, he attended the prestigious institution Beaux-Arts de Paris school of art. For three years there he studied different forms, mediums, and learned new techniques and uses of creative tools. Through his network, art expositions and vernissages, and exposure to the world's great masters in Paris and across Europe, Peter developed a sense of style and expression that is uniquely his. He helped found the BAM collective, showing his work on several occasions while in Paris through the organization’s exhibitions. From 2006 to present, Peter has painted a wide body of work inspired by his worldly travels, on display at Seattle galleries, corporations, and public spaces in addition to gracing an artist series of wine labels for a boutique, upscale Washington state winery.
His works include large contemporary paintings, clay and plaster sculptures, smaller studies and commissioned pieces. Many of his artworks now hang in fine private homes in the United States and Europe and can be found at Ryan James Fine Art gallery in Kirkland, WA.
Peter died unexpectedly in June, 2019 and is survived by his wife Heather and their children Alexander and Allegra.
Calendar:
Peter Knox
The Final Works
March 1st-31st
Reception March 12th 5-9p
Friends and Family Memorial March 14th
ryan james fine arts 11905 124th Ave ne Kirkland WA 98034
Artist Statement:
Peter Knox uses color, shapes, and the beauty and perfection of the human body, perhaps the world’s greatest example of innovation and the perfect system, to bring his works to life. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. With theory as well as the avant-garde and post-modern movement as a form of resistance against traditional painting form, multilayered images arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality are questioned.
