Welcome to Knuttel Prints

If you own a Knuttel design you are in some very famous company. Colin Farrell, Sylvester Stallone, Whoopie Goldberg to name a few all have works from the artist. Now this is your chance to place a Knuttel on your wall without breaking the bank.

Artist to the stars Graham Knuttel has now for the first time released some of his images for an exclusive run of limited edition prints. Click here to view our limited edition prints

Win a large framed limited edition
Graham Knuttel print!

Limited Edition

Produced to the highest possible standards your Knuttel print is one of a strict limited edition of 50 print hand signed and blind stamped by the artist with the edition number inscribed. Each print will also be accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

There are several selected images exclusively for sale on this official web site. You will not be able to purchase these prints anywhere else. There will be another selection of prints for sale at selected stores through Ireland, UK, EU and the rest of the world. Please enjoy browsing through this site and remember you are only a few clicks away from proudly owning your own Knuttel. ]]> http://www.knuttelprints.com/homepage-1/homepage/feed/ 0 http://www.knuttelprints.com/media-room/i-make-art-for-six-days-and-go-on-a-bender-on-the-seventh/ http://www.knuttelprints.com/media-room/i-make-art-for-six-days-and-go-on-a-bender-on-the-seventh/#comments Sun, 17 May 2009 23:49:45 +0000 admin http://www.knuttelprints.com/?p=155 Graham Knuttel, the iconic artist of the Celtic Tiger era, has survived the boom years intact. But then he’s too long in the tooth, too cynical about his own reputation as ‘painter to the stars’ and, most of all, too hard working to ever allow the fickle finger of fashion press him down, he tells Valerie Shanley.

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