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- Courtney Knight
Courtney Knight
In a sunlit Brooklyn loft that is both her home and her studio, Courtney Knight paints scenes that feel like dreams made vibrant. Her art is a lively mix of painting and drawing, capturing fleeting moments and perpetual motions, and blending personal history with a universal sense of movement and play. An exploration of colour and expressive forms, it is inspired by a lifetime of visual stimuli—from the beaches of her childhood to the chaotic streets and skies of her newfound home in New York City.
“I’m lucky to have lived in beautiful places,” Courtney reflects, “I think it adds the background to scenes in my dreams and ideas.” Growing up in Winthrop, Massachusetts, a small peninsula surrounded by beaches, she was inspired by the view of planes soaring overhead and sailboats dotting the water below. The combination of land, sky and water provided a sense of motion and fluidity that would later define her work. Now, even in her Brooklyn loft, airplanes continue to pass by her window, serving as a reminder of perspective shifts and the feeling of not being stuck in one place. “It’s a reminder of movement,” she says, “a sense of agency in your own life.” That idea of movement—both literal and metaphorical—is a thread that runs throughout her art.
Her practice is as dynamic as the imagery she paints. Lately, she has been experimenting with a combination of oils and ceramics, pushing the boundaries of traditional media to find new ways to express the energy she feels so compelled to capture. “I’ve always had a need to create many things at once,” she says of her restless creative spirit. “I work on several paintings at a time because I can’t get the ideas out fast enough before I lose them.”
Fascination with motion
At the heart of her process is the humble sketchbook, where she lets her ideas take shape in wax pastels, or “grown-up crayons” as she calls them. Courtney’s drawings, often organised in comic book-style panels, serve as the blueprint for her larger works on canvas. She describes her process as chasing down the energy of these original sketches, transforming them into looser, more textured paintings through colour blocking and linework. “I’m hooked on colour,” she says, citing her recent use of fluorescent pink underpaintings to create a playful warmth beneath the surface of her canvases. Lately, her colour palette has gravitated towards reds, violets and browns in an ongoing exploration of new moods and visual contrasts.
Her inspirations are as eclectic as her materials: “I’m inspired by older cartoons, airplanes, boxing and anything with movement,” she says. Recurring themes of time, repetition and play find their way into her art, echoing her fascination with motion. Sports and interiors often serve as motifs, representing both the physical and psychological spaces where people exist and move. Yet, for all the energy in her work, there is a dreamlike quality to her compositions, a blend of surrealism, Fauvism and impressionism. “Dreams, art books, movies, cartoons, being near water—those are my eternal sources of inspiration,” she says. These influences swirl together in her paintings, creating a world that feels at once familiar and fantastical.