Among the canvases propped up against the wall, there is something familiar about the woman with the angular features and sharp bobbed hair. “That’s a new portrait of Erin O’Connor,” says the artist behind the painting, adding that the English fashion model will be one of the guests on the opening night of his new exhibition. While the referencing of celebrity is something 55-year-old Graham Knuttel appreciates as inevitable in modern culture, he cringes at the endless association of his own name with Robert de Niro and Sylvester Stallone. The film stars are among the high-profile buyers of his work.

“It’s embarrassing. The press just won’t leave it alone. That whole period took place over just two months, but I’ve never been able to live it down.” Knuttel has a more direct Holly­wood connection – Archibald Leach, better known as actor Cary Grant, was an uncle. They never met, he says politely, but wearily, adding that continual name dropping by commentators takes the focus away from his work.

“An assumption is made that you’re froth. You become overlooked by the serious art critics. Not that I have much time for critics, though. You’re not an art critic, are you?”

Strangely enough, having established that the Sunday Tribune wants to hear more about the man behind the art, as opposed to just his work, he relaxes and smokes another roll-up. Knuttel cuts a slight, youthful figure, dressed in pale blue shirt, jeans and velvet slippers. His new collection is called ‘Back to Basics’, mainly because he’s gone back to his first artistic discipline – sculpture. It’s not a huge visual leap for the viewer as Knuttel’s brush signature is subjects which look like they’ve been carved from a solid block, figures heavily defined in thick outline, with large almond eyes straight from an Egyptian wall painting. The new work features none of the disturbing gangsters/banksters, pimps and prostitutes that people his distinctive canvases.

While his pictures, tapestries and rugs were considered as appealing particularly to young professional male buyers during the boom, you would want an especially big bachelor pad to accommodate his latest sculptures. Knuttel’s move to three-dimensional form has resulted in very large pieces in wood and bronze, including colourful birds, sheep, fish and a particularly ginormous kitten. But is the ‘Back to Basics’ title also a reference to these more straitened times?

Like everyone else, Knuttel says he’s got to work to survive, while acknowledging that opening nights now draw rather less stuffed wallets. How does he think his exhibition will go? “I’ll tell you next week,” he smiles.

South Frederick Street is like a microcosm of the good life gone by. A bistro, an Italian restaurant, a cafe, a couple of art galleries and a fashion-designer salon sit discreetly along the narrow Georgian terrace. Knuttel bought his tall, 1730s house here in 1995. It brings the notion of working from home to a whole new level. The stairs soar up several storeys from the bright entrance hall, natural light flowing through lofty sash windows and bouncing off white painted walls. He lives here with his partner. She prefers to remain private he says, “although I’ll tell you that her first name is Ruth”.

His studio is itself undergoing painting – the matte emulsion variety – as the house gets a freshen-up before it transforms into a gallery space next Thursday night. This room, and the sittingroom directly above it, have the classical proportions of the early Georgian townhouse, including an ‘echo’ – an authentic extension to enhance light at the rear of the building. The travel cot in the corner of the formal livingroom – standing out incongruously amongst the bright new artwork – belongs to his seven-month old grand-daughter Ella. Literary critic Cyril Connolly’s famous remark that “There is no more sombre enemy to good art than the pram in the hall” doesn’t apply here. Baby Ella has helped inspire the light-hearted, fun element in this new departure in Knuttel’s artistic life. It’s the perfect place to work, he says.

“It’s really quiet in the studio. It is a great place to live too, although they should pedestrianise the street. It can be dangerous at the weekends – you could meet someone like me,” he jokes. He’s referring to what he calls his regular medicinal “bender” – his way of relaxing after six days of solid work. During the week, he gets up at 6.30am, “waking up with Maxi on RTé” and works in the studio until six. “God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh; I make art for six days and go on a bender on the seventh,” says Knuttel, and he’s only half-joking. “Binge drinking is really what it’s called. And binge drinking is what Irish people do now. The pace of life is so fast, people cram their relaxation time, their socialising, their drinking, into one session. Years ago, the bartender in the pub knew you, there were parameters. Nowadays, nobody takes responsibility for you. But maybe that will change again as there are so few people in the pubs. Bartenders might start looking after customers again.”

Born in Dublin in 1954, it’s to be supposed that Knuttel’s non-conformist approach to life and work comes from his parents – his mother was an English Unitarian, his father was a German Jew. He knew he wanted to be an artist from an early age. “There were always art books around, and my older brother Peter was a watercolourist.” Of his artist nephew Jonathan, whose style is seen as similar to his own, he prefers not to comment.

Knuttel’s strong recollection of the years of study at Dun Laoghaire College of Art is that he was “a messer. And I’ve been a messer ever since. But those years, l972 to ’76, were when the college was just starting out. It was a very exciting time. We were designing an art school around us. What was Dublin like then? A bit like what it’s going to be like in six months from now,” he laughs.

Just off Grafton Street, the Coffee Inn and the Bailey were great refuges from the gloom of the ’70s and ’80s, he recalls. “Dublin was like a Flann O’Brien novel. But there was always an escape – if you got a job sweeping the streets in London, you thought you had hit the jackpot. The art scene here at that time was very small, very elitist, and run by about six different mafias.”

The boom years were obviously a good time for him financially. But he doesn’t believe that times of plenty necessarily result in great art – it’s taken that he’s talking in general, rather than personal, terms here.

“Everything became a bit too easy. And easy money stifles creativity. In a way, people buy something for the sake of it. But then nobody complained about the excess – and that’s why we have this problem now.” Artists survive recessions, he says, because “all they need is a paper and a pencil. This isn’t my first recession, and it probably won’t be my last.”

Why does he paint and sculpt? Is he struggling to express something? Does he get pleasure from the work? Or is it just to make money? “All three of those. But I do get great pleasure from working intensely on a piece. Then when you’ve spent so long on something, and it’s finished, you move on to the next project. There is a great satisfaction in that.”

The women in Knuttel’s life have inspired much of the work. The late artist Rachel Strong was his partner and muse for nearly a decade before she died in 2003. Her heroin addiction prompted him to cut back on his drinking. “I learnt so much from Rachel,” he says. “I learned about life. About the system.
I went to clinics with her, to prisons with her. When I started painting the gangsters, the dealers, they were her world.”

Why is it that while some seek beauty in art, it’s the menace emanating from his darker pictures that holds appeal for others? “Artists illustrate what people can only dream about. Or what they have nightmares about. You can choose whether to delight, or to shock.”

For now, it’s the sunnier side of life, as opposed to its darker undercurrent, that informs his work. And the latest addition to the Knuttel family approves. Baby Ella’s mother is Kate, Knuttel’s daughter from his former relationship with artist Anna McCloud. Kate was born when he was 26. He knew he would enjoy being a granddad.

“Ella is a joy. She was born in October ? she inspired the sculptures. I started working on them in November. They’re just like big toys, really. She’s beginning to react to them now. She stares. If she’s crying, and you park her up beside one, she stops instantly and smiles. They’re meant to be fun. To be uplifting. And I think everyone needs a bit of that now.”
http://www.tribune.ie/article/2009/may/17/i-make-art-for-six-days-and-go-on-a-bender-on-the-/

Be afraid, be very afraid, for these are no ordinary, docile ruminants; these are the creation of Ireland’s latter-day Noah, Graham Knuttel. Knuttel’s new exhibition is focused on the animal kingdom. There are paintings and tapestries, but the key pieces are oversized wooden sculptures.

There’s a diva of a cat, a giant cockerel, sheep, birds and a cabinet of curiosities filled with fish from exotic climes.

The exhibition is entitled Back to Basics because, with sculpture, Knuttel has returned to the medium of his earliest work. It was in his final year at art school that he abandoned painting for wood-carving.

He won a prestigious award (Royal Canada Trust Award for Young Sculptors) but returned to painting as soon as he graduated. ‘‘It was too expensive to sculpt,” he said.

So why sculpt again at this stage in his career? ‘‘It sounds like a cliché, but it’s like a journey,” Knuttel said. ‘‘My early work was [composed of] mechanical wooden sculptures with moving parts in natural wood, but there was something missing, and I think it was colour.

I learned about colour through learning to paint. Then again, with the recession and everything, I suppose I must be feeling insecure and perhaps want something a little bit more solid.”

Solid doesn’t begin to describe the works that fill three floors of his large, Georgian townhouse. The cat looks as big as a bungalow, the cockerel is eight-foot high and, with their bulky carved bodies and spindly bronze legs, each sheep weighs a tonne.

All are carved with electric hand tools out of American oak – the best wood with the straightest grain, according to Knuttel.

Those who like art to have a modicum of decorum won’t be amused. No one blows a raspberry in the face of good taste like this son of Anglo-German stock who is nevertheless Irish to the tips of his paint-spattered fingers.

His stated aim is to ‘‘paint the human predicament’’ and humour is his corner stone, but it is humour with an edge. All those in-your-face manic characters that have made his name over the past 20 years eerily presage the current state of the national psyche.

Animals have been a recurring theme since his boyhood, when he used to paint seagulls. He describes his cat, Tango, as ‘‘good company’’. He is a regular visitor to the zoo, although he bemoans recent improvements.

‘‘They’ve built a jungle for the animals so now they all hide away,” he said. ‘‘I find using the images of animals therapeutic, because it takes me away from the humans, and they can possess as many emotions as people.”

Knuttel is a genial host, courteous to a fault, but there is something of the illusionist in his persona and one itches to see inside his head. This is an integral part of the appeal of the work.

There’s a theatricality to planet Knuttel, a whiff of the fairground or the circus, and it comes as no surprise to learn that Punch and Judy, which he sees as halfway between the human and animal kingdoms, was an early influence. His fantasy world permeates his dreams. ‘‘If I have a problem with the work, I dream it out,” he said.

Knuttel’s stock in trade is acting out but, in one particular work, there’s a much subtler element. The piece is a beautiful bronze, another study of sheep, but executed with a finesse and an elegance that is surprisingly, given the subject, wholly seductive.

http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2009/05/17/story41716.asp

The latest model of Mini was launched last November and the first new Mini to enter Ireland was rushed off the transport truck to a BMW Group dealership to be stripped down to the bare body of the car for Graham to start the design.

Mini Manager, Nicola Bissett said, “The style of Graham Knuttel’s painting, represents all the Mini values, in this work of art he has perfectly demonstrated the spirit and essence of Mini, which is key to the brand’s popularity and success.”

The Graham Knuttel Mini will visit Mini dealerships throughout the country over the coming weeks and months, before being auctioned for charity.

Globally Mini has a close relationship with a number of creative enterprises in the areas of film, art, fashion, music, media and the design world. The iconic cars have provided a platform for creativity and have been used as canvases for Mario Testino, Missoni, Diesel, Donatella Versace and Puma. Now Mini Ireland has a contribution to this legacy.

http://www.galwayindependent.com/motoring/motoring/graham-knuttel-ignites-the-spirit-of-mini

His new collection is the product of a collaboration with Irish weavers, the Dixon Carpet Company, which manufactures rugs in Oughterard, Co Galway. The company was previously called V’Soske Joyce.

Tapestries have enjoyed a revival in art circles since 2004. However, Knuttel was ahead of the game having turned his attention to rugs in 2001 when he chose the famous Pinton Tapestry manufacturer in Aubusson in France to weave his patterns.

He is also an established sculptor and is now exploring ceramics as a new medium. His rug collection incorporates Knuttel’s trademark hooded eyes and bold blues and reds, which are a dominant feature of his artwork.

‘‘I’ve been working on this collection of hand tufted rugs for 18 months,” he said. ‘‘The designs depict wildlife, including cats, birds and fish and not people. But the eyes are similar – whether human or animal, the eyes in all my paintings have an edge of ambiguity.” The rugs cost between €9,000 and €12,000 and each one is a limited edition of five.

Knuttel and the Dixon Carpet Company have an impressive clientele. Knuttel collectors include Saathchi & Saatchi London, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, several Hollywood film stars and international banking corporations.

Dixon Carpets has supplied carpets to more than half of the largest yachts in the world, to private aircraft, Irish and American embassies, five-star hotels and to Saudi Arabia’s royal family.

http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2006/09/24/story17538.asp

“It is an amazing place. I do all my casting there.”

When it comes to making special tables for chess sets, Knuttel also has the expertise.

“Woodwork was my first love.

I taught it at Dun Laoghire art college.” He contributed to the table design with Linley. “I wanted an impressive table, ” he says. “You have to buy the chess set and table together.”

His liaison with Linley isn’t unusual, either. During his stint in London, he lived across the road from Linley’s King’s Road workshop and he saw the pieces of wood going in and out. “I could see that he was a good craftsman and much later back in Dublin, when I was wondering what to do with my chess set, I thought of him and got in touch.”

The partnership with Linley is a lucrative one for Knuttel.

At the moment he has in mind a small number of console tables which he will sell at his exhibitions and which Linley will sell in his Pimlico shop.

“My people will tell your people and your people will tell mine, ” he says jokingly by way of explaining that they both have a formidable set of contacts who will talk about their work. The pieces were unveiled three months ago at designer Louise Kennedy’s Merrion Square premises, and were showcased at an exhibition of Knuttel’s work in his own gallery. Last week they went to Galway where Russian chess players put Knuttel’s chess set through its first moves in a charity competition to raise money for the tsunami disaster . . . the pieces were so tall and heavy the Russians had to stand up to play.

And the pieces may travel even further. Linley is an international furniture designer with contacts far and wide. For instance, his design company has added its distinctive style to the interiors of the house Les Jolies Eaux on the Caribbean island of Mustique, once a retreat for his mother, Princess Margaret . . . it contains furniture by Linley’s great uncle, the late stage designer Oliver Messel. The six-bed palazzo, set on four acres above the sea, now belongs to Linley and can be rented by non-royals for somewhere around 8,000 to 10,000 per week depending on the season. A set of Knuttel’s chess pieces may even be standing by to entertain the guests.

The chess idea has been in gestation for some time. “I started making them six years ago, and then stopped and put the pieces in my basement for a year or two before I resurrected them again. It took me a lifetime to think up the idea, and two years to make the 12 sets.” And it appears they were worth the wait. Retailing at 70,000 each, “they are good value for the price”, he says.

“You’d pay that for a good car.

And they’ll never fall to bits like a car or lose their value.”

In a limited edition of 12, the large carved pieces are cast in 52 kilos of solid silver. All the pieces are hallmarked . . . the tallest pieces are 16 inches tall and the smaller ones eight inches.

Knuttel’s chess pieces are not based on any design from ancient chess games. “They are formal and pageantry in style and loosely based on the figures in my animal paintings, and a bit like the characters in my work, ” he says.

Knuttel is famous for his dramatic, sharp-edged, jigsawlike shapes.

There are now just two of his sets left for sale and he says “there will be no bother in getting rid of them”. He has moved on to his next project.

“I work from 7 am to 6pm. It keeps me out of trouble.”

Knuttel is currently preparing for his next exhibitions . . . on 18 June in Cork Street, London, and in Los Angeles next October.

Ancient chess Graham Knuttel’s chess sets will be the antiques of the future, but what about ancient chess sets, and where was the game invented?

Purists agree that its origins lie in China, India, Persia and Uzbekistan.

Whichever way it evolved between countries, it is clear that ancient chess, particularly Chinese chess, was a totally different game to western chess. The pieces in Chinese chess were mostly written in Chinese characters and placed on ‘points’ rather than on squares. The original chess boards in India and Persia didn’t have white and black coloured squares but used flat tiles with characters rather than carved figures.

The first evidence of physical pieces doesn’t appear until the game reached Christian Europe.

The claim for Uzbekistan as a source for chess is based on the finding of what appears to be pieces from an old chess set featuring the figure of an elephant, which was dug up in 1972. It has been dated to the second century AD.

The modern form of chess was codified in Italy during the 15th century, and it spread like wildfire across Europe.

Chess in Europe prior to 1475 was substantially the same as that played by the Persians, Indians and Arabs in the seventh century. The most popular form of the game remained the same for about 800 years, during which time there were constant experiments with different types of pieces, such as griffins, unicorns and other strange animals.

The game continues to be most popular in China, with hundreds of millions of active players. You only have to go to any city or village in China and to see men and women playing it in trains, buses, hotels, offices and parks. If you want to play a game of chess in China, all you have to do is to put down a board and pieces on the footpath and an opponent will materialise instantly.

It’s not surprising that with such a chequered history, chess eventually had to be standardised. In the early 19th century, complaints about the unsuitability of different designs led John Jacques, a noted London ivory turner, to search for a standard design at a reasonable cost.

Most of the sets of the period, such as the Lund, Merrifield, Calvert, and Saint George patterns, were intricate and expensive to produce.

Jacques removed the decorative features most liable to damage and widened the bases . . . he corrected most of the design deficiencies found in contemporary designs.

And so on 1 March 1849, in collaboration with Nathaniel Cook of 198 Strand Road, London, an ornamental design for a set of chessmen, under the Ornamental Designs Act of 1842, was registered. The set was named after the self-proclaimed world champion, Howard Staunton, an English Shakespearian scholar. The right to manufacture the sets was acquired by John Jacques’s London company. The Staunton pattern chess set, with its clean, simple design, quickly became the world standard for serious and casual play.

These Staunton sets are now highly collectible, although there’s nothing wrong with looking out for a 1920s carved ivory Chinese export chess set or anything from the multitude of Asian sources. They might not be standardised for today’s play, but they could be beautiful, unusual and rare.

https://www.tribune.ie/article/2005/feb/20/adding-to-a-chequered-history/

(FORTUNE Small Business) – Jerry and Eva Posman were debating whether to buy the photograph. Jerry: “Am I buying a work from someone who will disappear from the universe?” Eva: “But it gives us joy.” Jerry: “What will the resale value be?” Eva: “But we love it.”

Love won the day. The Posmans bought “Isolation Ward–Ellis Island,” by little-known photographer Chad Kleitsch, for their Manhattan apartment. To be fair to Posman, he was playing devil’s advocate. As novice collectors–with 20-some works, none priced above $2,250–the Posmans don’t see themselves as investors. “Maybe someday,” says Jerry. “For now, we just want to wake up in the morning and say, ‘Wow, we like this.’”

The word “amateur” comes from the Latin word for love. But even amateurs need to learn a few things about this affair of the heart: One, what kind of art, from old-master drawings to post-modern sculpture, will make you happy, and why you should meet it in person, not just online. Two, how a dealer can help you avoid grief. And three, how to protect yourself in a volatile market.

Mario Castillo, a consultant in Washington, D.C., may have had the ideal amateur’s education. He fell in love with art at age 12, stopping in the Fort Concho Museum in San Angelo, Texas, on his way home from grammar school. “I didn’t really know what I was looking at,” says Castillo, “but there were colors, and there were cowboys and Indians. A boy could dream.” In college he took art courses, and as a congressional staffer he roamed Washington’s rich trove of galleries. Castillo started by collecting realistic art (“An apple looked like an apple,” he says). But his taste changed. A turning point was his $750 purchase of “Sirocco” by impressionist Donald Nix–courtesy of an understanding gallery owner who let Castillo buy the work on an installment plan. Now Castillo leaves time to browse galleries on every business trip.

You may have reached a ripe age without knowing an impressionist from an expressionist. But you can start your training anytime. Plumb your taste by looking through art books–the beautiful, weighty kind that anchor coffee tables. Better yet, absorb the vibrations from real paint and canvas or steel and granite at a museum. Find a school or college course. Go to auction previews to get close to a work, then to the auction itself to feel the collective excitement.

But when you start to spend money, build a relationship with a good dealer who will teach you. The Posmans’ dealer helped them take the plunge on one work by offering to buy it back if they changed their minds. Castillo found his dealer only after walking out of one gallery after another in New York City’s SoHo. “I’d spend five minutes looking at a piece; they’d rush me to buy,” he says. When he walked into Franklin Bowles Galleries in New York, the dealer told him to take his time and then spent two hours discussing the artist on exhibit. (That approach can obviously pay off for the dealer too: Castillo returned, planning to spend $3,000 on a single work, and walked out with a pair for $27,000.)

While plenty of collectors love to gamble on an artist’s rise to fame, many side with the Posmans in putting heart above purse. In 1993, Steve Glick, a William Morris agent in Los Angeles, and his wife bought three works by Irish painter Graham Knuttel, then unknown in the U.S. When Sylvester Stallone later commissioned a portrait by him, it put the artist’s prices into overdrive. But Glick says he isn’t interested in profit taking, at least for now.

Still, plunking down money can make you feel vulnerable–especially with today’s breathtaking prices. Some art-market players think the price for a single work will soon hit the $100 million mark; that would break the record set in 1990, at the end of the last boom, when a van Gogh went for $82.5 million. But prices are volatile. Some of last year’s hot artists are barely selling this year.

Dealer Yancey Richardson of New York City cautions that buying at auction is especially risky. A client of hers won the bidding for a Mapplethorpe photo–without Richardson’s input–then discovered a small crease in the print that sharply lowers its value. Lesson: Take your dealer to the preview, then let her bid. She’s less likely to get carried away.

The hottest new auctions, of course, are online. “The Internet is the future,” says New York City consultant Renee Price. “But it doesn’t replace seeing an object and feeling it beam its aura back at you.”

Jose Soriano knows the feeling. A collector all his life, Soriano once bought a painting signed by the French impressionist Eugene Louis Boudin, for $800. Though he learned years later that it was a fake, Soriano is still fond of what he calls “my little Boudin.” We’re talking about love.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2000/04/01/277556/index.htm