"Never Late for Heaven" chronicles an odyssey in American art and
social events beginning with the often-romanticized Harlem
Renaissance and traveling through the Great Depression and beyond.
Gwen Knight's story reveals the life and the passion for painting
of a young woman who was surrounded and supported by her community.
Her formal education cut short by the Depression, Knight left
Howard University and returned to Harlem, where her real art
education began. For several years she participated in WPA
apprenticeships and workshops, guided by her own independent mind
and spirit. She and her fellow painters, including Jacob Lawrence
(whom she later married), immersed themselves in a world that was
creating its own narrative in history, literature, music, and
theater. As New York was a mecca for artists of all stripes, Harlem
was a singular world within that mecca. Knight recalls that
everything was alive; that she lived so rigorously in the present
that there was no thought about the future. Knight and Lawrence
moved to Seattle in 1971, when Jacob accepted a teaching post in
the art school at the University of Washington.
Knight's paintings, spanning more than sixty years in New York
and Seattle, demonstrate one artist's determination to make art.
There was no career path or external motivation to drive her, only
a belief that making art was a way of life. The skillful,
intellectual, and emotionally sensitive works in this book pull the
viewer into a world that is both controlled and fluid. Never Late
for Heaven shows a painter whose long life and good fortune have
delivered her to us, with her art work, right on time.
"Never Late for Heaven" accompanied a 2003 exhibit at the Tacoma
Art Museum featuring paintings from the Francine Seders Gallery in
Seattle.
Janeanne Upp is executive director of the Tacoma Art Museum.
Sheryl Conkelton is a curator based in Seattle specializing in
contemporary art. She has held positions with the Henry Art
Gallery, Seattle; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art; the California Museum of Photography;
and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Barbara Earl
Thomas is a painter and writer living in Seattle. Her artwork is
held in collections throughout the United States, and her essays
have been widely published. Her paintings and writing are featured
in the book "Storm Watch: The Art of Barbara Earl Thomas. "
"As long as I have known Gwen, her art has been about making
vivid 'observations' - portraits of people, depictions of objects
and portrayals of feelings, movements, and memories. She is a keen
observer, formally trained as a sculptor and painter to use volume
and color as a way of expressing a likeness. Her work is sensitive
to nuance but does not have a shred of sentimentality in it. She is
tough and pragmatic and one of the most charismatic and generous
persons you could ever hope to meet." - Michael Spafford
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