Echoes of Being -
Echoes of Being
Artist Statement — Michael Kent Knutson
Echoes of Being is an ongoing body of mixed media monotype prints that has evolved quietly in the shadows of my studio over the past several years. What began as an annual teaching practice—created alongside the printmaking course I offer once a year—has become a meditative ritual. I now find myself surrounded by hundreds of these impressions, each suspended between completion and becoming, between resolution and openness.
As a painter and draftsman, printmaking offers me a different kind of language—one rooted in process, unpredictability, and repetition. These prints emerge through layers of ink, paper, and touch, accumulating gestures that feel both deliberate and accidental. I hesitate to call them finished; rather, they remain in flux, continually revealing their own presence and impermanence.
This work also draws inspiration from the mythology and landscape of the American West—the dust, distance, and quiet heroism that echo through western films and cowboy imagery. These figures often drift through open space, like spirits caught between myth and memory. They speak to solitude, endurance, and the search for identity in vast, uncertain terrain.
The spirit of Echoes of Being carries the imprint of my mentors and friends: Joshua Knott’s quiet mastery of paper lithography, Gordon Sherman’s introduction to the monotype’s alchemy, and the restless experimental energy of artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine. Their influence lingers in these prints like afterimages—part teaching, part memory, part conversation across time.
Although these works resonate with my Imaginary Friends series, they have become their own entities. Each impression is a trace—a haunting of people, gestures, and fleeting experiences that refuse to fully disappear. Echoes of Being reflects on presence within absence, on the quiet persistence of form, memory, and myth that remains after the image fades.
