Landscapes
Michael Knutson
Landscape - Artist Statement
I never expected to become a landscape painter—yet, in many ways, the landscape found me. Growing up in the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota, with two art-educator parents who were endlessly outdoors, I spent my childhood immersed in the rhythms of the natural world. Our family’s supper breaks were often spent beside campfires, beneath stars, or traveling through the mountain west. Those early experiences shaped my deep connection to the land and the sublime forces of nature—from mountain to plain, and from forest to open sky.
After leaving the mountains for western Kansas, I assumed the move would be temporary. Instead, the vastness of the short-grass prairie captivated me. The high plains—with their endless horizons, long vistas, and skies that seem to breathe—offered a new kind of inspiration. Out here, sunsets stretch farther, storms evolve into towering creatures, and the boundary between earth and sky dissolves into pure light. I am drawn to those fleeting moments of transformation, when time feels suspended—when a storm rolls in, or when dusk folds into night.
My work seeks to capture that transient energy—the beauty that appears only to vanish moments later. Through paint, I explore how the mundane, the overlooked, or even the “ugly” can become luminous and extraordinary. I am inspired by the life that inhabits this environment: the bison, pronghorn, prairie dogs, and turkey vultures that embody resilience and belonging in an often unforgiving landscape. I also find fascination in the nocturnal world—where the glow of a distant gas station, a flickering campfire, or the vast Milky Way transforms darkness into cinematic wonder.
My practice invites viewers into atmospheric worlds charged with both mystery and familiarity—where alien abductions of bison, fiery plains sunsets, and quiet, hallucinatory moments coexist. These images are not just depictions of place but reflections of presence and perception, of being still enough to witness the earth breathe.
In the act of painting, I find peace and clarity. Watching clouds shift and trees sway allows me to forget life’s noise and to connect deeply with the natural world. What began as resistance to the landscape has become a lifelong dialogue with it—a conversation between light, air, and memory.
