Imaginary Friends
Imaginary Friends
Artist Statement – Michael Knutson
Imaginary Friends is an evolving body of work composed of multiple paintings and mixed media pieces that vary in scale, material, and sensibility. Installed in dense, organic arrangements—often salon-style—the works cluster together, forming visual constellations that seem to grow and shift across the gallery wall. On one end, the imagery is rooted in realism: portraits, objects, and places drawn from lived experience. As the installation progresses, the work gradually transforms—figures distort, forms loosen, and imagery dissolves into dreamlike, surreal abstractions.
Throughout the installation, portraits mingle with landscapes that trace a subtle passage from daylight to dusk, from twilight to deep night. This gradual dimming mirrors an emotional descent—a meditation on the fleeting nature of connection and the quiet persistence of loneliness. Imaginary Friends explores the paradox of contemporary relationships: I live in an age of endless digital friendship, yet find myself waving from a distance to faces I no longer truly know.
As an educator, I’ve crossed paths with countless students and colleagues—relationships that burn brightly for a moment in the classroom and then fade into memory. These portraits and figures become a kind of visual Rolodex of those encounters, fragments of people and emotions revisited through paint.
Process and experimentation are central to this series. Working within a community college studio environment, I often reclaim abandoned or unfinished student paintings—surfaces that carry traces of learning and failure. On these grounds, I work rapidly and intuitively, allowing distortion, spontaneity, and accident to guide the composition. Figures emerge and dissolve, morphing into wild, starfish-like forms or spectral presences.
The installation resists singular interpretation. When the paintings are hung together, unexpected narratives unfold through proximity—a figure leaning toward another, a portrait beside a nocturnal landscape. Viewers may wonder: Who are these people? Are they connected? Are they still real, or merely imagined?
Ultimately, Imaginary Friends invites the viewer into a liminal space where memory, imagination, and identity intertwine—a place both familiar and distant, where friendships linger as beautiful, fading echoes of what once was.