Art World Irvington

Friday, June 19, 2026

Brian Fick Paintings at Edington Gallery

Awe Free Couch, Brian Fick

Soul Refreshing.

Painter Brian Fick exhibited a large group of relatively recent art work at Edington Gallery in Indianapolis in May. Hint of Sublimity presented colorful acrylic paintings on luan panels of various sizes.

Some of the works have custom and painted frames of Fick's design and decoration, and all have bronze plaque nameplates providing the title of each piece.

A first time visit revealed Edington Gallery, on the city's near northwest-side, as an exceptional place that provides an ideal, museum-like setting for artwork.

White walls, nondescript floor, well-lit in a symmetrical spacious layout with high ceilings. It's really a perfect gallery of a type seldom seen and there is something refreshing and invigorating about seeing art so expertly presented.

Hint of Sublimity, Brian Fick, partial installation at Edington Gallery

Fick's paintings bloom and beam among the four pristine walls. They certainly present more than a hint of a certain something in the space.

Sublimity is defined as the quality of being extremely excellent, majestic or beautiful – often describing a feeling or state that transcends ordinary greatness, inspiring deep emotion, reverence, or awe.

It is a word often associated with the Romantic Era in art, and landscape painters such as J. M. W. Turner and Albert Bierstadt, as well as in the music of Beethoven and many well known writers and poets. That emotionally energized era, if not an inspiration, is not alien to Fick's art.

His paintings are at times moody, expressionistic and gorgeously decorative. Some gush and ooze a rainbow of color. Many bask in a brightness of sky, infused by a changing light. One or two glower in a disorienting atmospheric darkness.

That is to say of the lot, a wide range of feelings are inspired in glancing upon and across Fick's paintings – sensations from intimate to overwhelming, in pictures from small to large.

Life Itself Among the Gates.

One picture above all, is immense. It is a showstopper size with a beautiful and foreboding presence and dwarfs the surrounding works.

Fortress of Solicitude portrays a somewhat modest Edwardian house in a somewhat robust manner – in a decorative, elegant style befitting the Sun King at Versailles.

Fortress of Solicitude, Brian Fick

We have a symmetrically perfect house. If it is not painted yellow in color, then it is bathed in golden light. We have pink light at the level of the building's first floor. On the second, we have a stained glass arched window pointed upwards, toward the heavens, by way of lightning rod.

Beyond the house, a metallic gate of delightfully fussy intricacy, reflecting both the pink and gold. It seems a fence, a protective presence. Not around the house, but below, and aside, and above.

Whether a gate or fragile fence, it extends delicately from the house at the picture's center to the edge of the artwork's large frame. It is a hand-painted incorporation of picture and frame in what we now recognize as the Brian Fick manner. It is seen in several paintings in the show, and in numerous works by him in the past. The manner of his decorative spell enchants and entertains and succeeds.

Maybe it's a sly post-modern questioning of when a painting truly becomes a painting, or where a picture starts and where it ends. It's not a dry scholarly inquiry that Fick posits with this device of his style, but rather a lavish and poetic quibble to ponder in the heavenly corners of a daydream.

A wonderful conundrum observing itself like Ralph Waldo Emerson, lounging on the morning grass, imaging the universe in a single drop of dew, or the other way around.

Aesthetic Layers of Pattern.

The grid-like decoration, be it fence, or gate, or mere artifice, is a fundamental component in most all of Fick's paintings in the show. His use of these patterned grids and decorative overlays is not spelled out in any artist statement that accompanies the show.

But even if Fick's intentions are not known, certain patterns can be entertained as our eyes toy with the graceful beauty he employs.

Sometimes it is a sedimentary layer in his painting, a foundational framework beneath providing a firmness of structure, an almost hidden strength, and only eroded to the surface, in places.

Other times, it is the uppermost layer that acts as a fence or a stylized filter separating the viewer from the painting beyond.

Rarely, but at times, it is a compositional devise unto itself, added to a picture like any other item of still life or object of interest in a landscape scene.

Two pictures of the beyond type are Asinicide and Etude for Pedolin and Eructations. Both portray a rolling landscape of empty hills and dramatic sundown skies. The portraits of these landscapes, transitioning from day to night, are viewed through a screen of filigree.

Etude for Pendolin and Eructations, Brian Fick

In Etude it is as if you are looking out into the distant fields through a wall that has dissolved. Well...all but dissolved. The only part of the wall that remains is a specter of its wallpaper pattern.

Asinicide is overrun by organic forms in the picture and the frame. It has a medallion-like grate of curves and curlicues that circle over the landscape from the center outward. It's bordered by a rough hewn frame with corners further decorated with carved wooded leaves.

Asinicide, Brian Fick

Whereas the circular pattern in this painting may actually be an earlier level of work, it appears on top. The various washes of color are so thinly painted, that the pattern survives the entirety of the surface.

The maple leaf-shaped pendants at the outermost reach of the picture's corners seem to symbolize the never ending patterns of nature that reach out from the smallest point of creation to the end of all its cosmos.

Two paintings of the beneath type are Dichrous Batrachos and The Dyeing of the Lite.

In the latter, a Big Sur sort of gnarly landscape bellows in the sun. Grass and rock, foam and sky, cloud and sea can be ascertained in the tumult of the scene.

The Dyeing of the Lite, Brian Fick

Remnants of orangish pattern surround a central rocky peak and radiate toward the viewer like coagulated clots of sunspecks frozen in mid-flight.

In Dichrous Batrochos, a decorative pattern leaches stealthily above the rolling horizon of a strange landscape hedge of huge flowerheads.

Dichrous Batrachos, Brian Fick

The thick impasto at the bottom half of the painting contrasts in color, and dynamism with slightly patterned yellow sky and full moon above. The pattern, here, serves as a slight vertical bracing to a mostly horizontal view.

The small painting, Pizza Resistance, is of the final type, and seems a study in parts.

Pizza Resistance, Brian Fick

A bronze-colored daisy pattern hovers above a bed of pink and orange stones. The golden radius of the well-defined flower dominates the picture plane, as your brain tries to make sense of the contrast of an indigo area aside and atop a hot orange Rorschach test. The molten blob is itchingly abstract and surreal at the bottom right of the painting.

Isolative Darkness.

A couple paintings in the show are relatively dark and sober, even somber, in comparison to the exultant fiesta of color seen in most of the works.

Shadows and shaded clouds shroud the hills in Villa Belmonte.

Villa Belmonte, Brian Fick

Fick uses a deep purple pattern of lattice over the entire picture to further cloak the scene in mystery.

There is light in the picture, but not before the darkness. It exists beyond it, high up on the edge of clouds.

The romantics merged with modernists in transitional artists like Albert Pinkham Ryder of Massachusetts and Dorothy Morlan, of Indianapolis, a hundred or more years ago. These in-between artists used darkness as a symbol for something open-ended and vast and excitedly unknowable.

Fick uses a predominately cool palette only rarely in the show, but is effective when he does. Besides Villa, he embarks into the deep with his painting The Froth of Two Streams Joining.

The Froth of Two Streams Joining, Brian Fick

Again, in the ebb tide of transition, when day merges into night, when structure dissolves into chaos, in that place where an imprisoning fence hints of hope and deliverance at the foot of a divine gate, we find Brian Fick painting.

And what are we seeing as Fick dims our vision?

Are we a bird, above it all? Soaring above the danger of a cliff, and its jagged point? Maybe in such darkness, the fear of flying is rendered more meaningless amid the sound of pounding surf, and the beauty from a vantage point so high?

Fick paints a purple night and the moonlight shadows where two rivers become one in froth, and it's amazing to behold.

But again, it begs the question, not only in this painting but all of Fick's works in the show.

What is it we are seeing that is so beautiful, yet so cordoned off? So almost there, within arm's reach but somehow off limits?

What is that place beyond the fence and gate, and that gate outside the place? Nature or heaven, or one in the same?

Mark Diekhoff, June 2026

See Also:

Edington Gallery

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Monday, June 15, 2026

Robert Hunt Art at Carpenter Realtors in Irvington

2025 Third Place Poster, Robert Hunt

An initial exposure to the artwork of Robert Hunt occurred about seven or eight years ago at a community swap meet/flea market event at Huddleston Farmhouse in Cambridge City, Indiana.

Hunt had just a few small landscape paintings on view, and they displayed the dashing spontaneity of a new artist, mainly self trained, at early work in his career, learning his craft and materials and exploring the newfound objects of his fascination.

Fast forward to an exhibition opening on June 5 and continuing for the month, at Carpenter Realtors in the heart of Irvington on Washington Street. Hunt shows a large collection of oil paintings created over the last few years, which display an amazing creative work ethic and output, and a development with his main medium of oil paint that is amazing for an artist still relatively early in his craft.

The unifying theme of the show is the people and places of Irvington.

Robert Hunt Art at Carpenter Realtors, Irvington (partial view)

In the artist statement and bio that accompanies the show, we learn Hunt grew up in Irvington and attended both grade school and high school in the town. He frequently returns to Irvington and continues to be inspired to create artworks depicting some of community's most well-known landmarks and events.

Three major working themes dominate the exhibition; Irvington in the pandemic era, the annual Irvington Halloween Festival and notable Irvington landmarks.

Legends Operating At The Beginning Of The Pandemic, Robert Hunt

Hunt's medium-sized oil on board picture Legends Operating At The Beginning Of The Pandemic shows the interior of former Irvington restaurant bathed in yellow light at night. The epidemic solitude of the times is emphasized by the single worker, wearing blue gloves and taking telephone orders. The sole worker connecting with customers only via the phone is an apt portrait of those difficult times.

Another picture in this series is James Dant Clothier which portrays an Irvington merchant proprietor at the front door of his business aside a sign on the door that states, in steadfast trust, 'Hoosiers Will See It Through.'

These two paintings, and others in the series, portray a hopeful perseverance. The importance of just showing up.

Witch Pandemic Dancing, Robert Hunt

A large number of paintings seemed aimed at all the connoisseurs of cosplay in our community. They show portraits of people in full costume at the Halloween Festival and Parade including a gritty portrait of a Joker and another of an elder Elvis called The King, among many others.

Hunt's painting for the annual festival poster competition, 2025 Third Place Poster, (image at top of page) is his tour de force in this genre, a subject matter for the young at heart, and one that he clearly enjoys.

Irvington locations are painted in several landscapes that include My Eye Dr and Steer-Inn Nocturne as well as a few small detailed views of the marquee sign for the Irving Theater and other sights nearby.

Steer-Inn Nocturne, Robert Hunt

Hunt's most powerful works in the show portray Irvington's resilience in the wake of sadness and loss. Two paintings, one a candlelight vigil after the tragic death of a local child as a result of a reckless driving accident and the other a gathering of patrons in the wake of a fire at a Washington Street brew pub.

Everything's Burnt Except The Beer, Robert Hunt

Both show a facility with multi-figural compositions and the handling of light.

Finally, a small recent landscape called (New Harmony Indiana) Trees and Water. The painting reminds me of the first Hunt paintings I saw in Cambridge City.

This latest picture was perhaps created during the annual paint-out and competition event in the southern Indiana town – First Brush of Spring – this past April.

The painting shows the enthusiastic brushwork of those earlier works. It further reveals that although Hunt has developed and increased his themes and designs, simple things, then and now, can still catch his eye.

(New Harmony Indiana) Trees and Water, Robert Hunt

Mark Diekhoff, June 2026

Tuesday, June 9, 2026

The Art of Carla Knopp - Part Five

Mount Q, Carla Knopp

Bodies of Art.

Over the course of several years in the late 2000s and 2010s, the artwork of Carla Knopp will continue to change and evolve, and reform altogether. Looking at the paintings she created and displayed at her most important local shows from about a decade between 2008 and 2016, we cannot help but see cohesive and distinct periods – bodies of work.

Each show, a body of her oeuvre, laid bare like the naked protagonist in her early painting 6 AM Drug Test from 1990 (see in Part Two). Each new exhibition, a journal of picaresque experiences and intuitive thought experiments jotted down with paint.

Her shows are particularly effective in their cohesive visual storytelling. Just as an exotic vacation locale cannot be expressed by a single selfie snapshot, Knopp's aesthetic vision is best viewed not in individual pieces, but by immersion among a group. She seems conscious of this as she prepares her bodies of art during these years.

Looking at a picture in any of the shows, and then stepping back for the grander vista of a group, Knopp's paintings can be seen as a document of a temporal journey. A once-upon-a-time journey of struggles and achievements that reveal a balance between two great artistic rationales for painting itself; the traditional motive of creating a picture, and the more modern approach to moving paint around.

And there are more fundamental dichotomies at play in her painted tales; action versus analysis, spontaneity vicarious to reflection, inferno vis-a-vis paradiso.

Knopp creates in that elbow, that wedge between obvious sides; each visionary idea a coiled fulcrum ready to spring from competing currents and battling impulses. In-between places and tug-of-wars don't seem to bother her a bit.

It is a journey that will lead toward a magnum opus of a new direction – her eventual immersion into the universe of electronic art. But the painting shows of the new century come first and herald the way.

Magic Mountains and Torrents of Magma.

With the unveiling of each successive exhibition, we peek into Knopp's uniquely personal artistic eras that define themselves and reveal their self-contained visuality.

Her painted ideas are often conceptually dense, but painted with a light and and spontaneous touch, surprising and refreshing – interestingly idiosyncratic – as has become a signature attribute of the artist by this time.

Each show of pictures, a sumptuous feast of harmonious courses – each with a seemingly shared, or at least related, topography and flora. Sometimes there is a hint of fauna. And when there are the imprints of a civilization present, they are symbiotic to the scene in ways that do not mar, but merge with the landscapes she creates. If buildings appear, they are like Frank Lloyd Wrights that meld into the surrounding environment with their modesty of color and silhouette. And then there are the strange, being-made structures, are often organic, curving and biomorphic, with an effect of unsettling beauty.

In October 2008, Knopp's show Mounts was exhibited at 4 Star Gallery on Massachusetts Avenue.

The exhibition includes two larger landscape format works and a series of smaller square paintings. The larger works were reviewed by Dan Grossman writing in NUVO Newsweekly on November 9, 2009, as follows,

“The title Love Hovel, Barkshed Recreational Area may seem to indicate a real place name but the ethereal setting of this painting doesn't quite seem to resemble the title in any literal sense...
Knopp said she found the title for this piece after its composition, during a Google search that – like the composition process itself – was an intuitive one.”

Of the smaller Mounts series in the show and the other larger work, Grossman writes,

“All of the paintings in this show, including the oil on panel Mounts series, were painted intuitively. Correspondingly, they are less focused on representing any particular thing and more about the creative process itself. All, that is, except for Morning on Earth. By virtue of its stunning depiction of a blue shoreline and looping arches under a lightening sky, this painting captures the ephemeral beauty of the world we live in.”

Morning on Earth, Carla Knopp, from the exhibit Mounts

As mentioned earlier in this series, the Morning on Earth theme would be a recurring motif for the artist over the course of her ongoing career, beginning in the early 1990s. Whereas an earlier painting by that name presented a desolate landscape of acrid colors, savage clear-cut vegetation, and the deadpan inclusion of an alarm clock as pun, the identically titled work in the Mounts show depicts a surreal landscape of some earth-analog, habitable-zone exoplanet somewhere in the universe, with aqua-colored waters, foggy pink skies, tendriling vegetation and frozen molten points of emerging rock spotting the planet's surface from foreground to the deep receding distance.

This world's morning could be the electron miscroscopic image of any old thing, looked at so close as to become frightening and familiar in equal part, like a Jurassic Park gnat, or the bristling somethings that cover the face of a fly.

Or maybe, if the intuitive spark of thought, dancing among dendrites, could be seen, we are seeing it in this Earth morning by Knopp.

Mount B, Carla Knopp

The Mounts series of smaller square works are titled simply as Mount from A to Z. In all these works, Knopp paints sculptural, center-composed forms of emerging rocky peaks. In Mount A, Mount B and Mount Q, the rugged spires are topped with gem-like capstones or with glass-like orbs atop the craggy, pustular mounts.

Each erupting image is a Devil's Tower of geological wonder amid soft-focused landscapes of muted, barely-pastel skies and sfumato rolling hills.

Mount U, Carla Knopp

In Mount U, a more sinister bristle of seemingly sexual thrust is depicted. The gray-orb at the peak of this mount is collared by a ring of thorns like a sprig of spikes on a honey locust tree.

Knopp would next exhibit new oil paintings at Harrison Center in Indianapolis in April 2010. The show called Spawn was covered in a detailed feature article by Mary Lee Pappas appearing in The Indianapolis Star on April 9.

In the article, Pappas covers Knopp's career of late, her processes and techniques, and her works in the latest show,

“In 2009, Knopp exhibited in New York and was featured in New American Paintings, a juried magazine. Later this spring, she has a show at the Russell/Projects gallery in Virginia.
Knopp's narrative works (in Spawn), which are executed on pod-shaped, non-symmetrical wood panels – some as large as 5 feet in diameter – exude an organic, feminine feel.
Taking an intentionally naive approach, Knopp has allowed herself to paint without inhibition. The results are a testament to her marked skills as a painter."

(Pappas then quotes Knopp)

" 'There's kind of a spawning in the creative process, so it's a very general term that just happens to work well with the imagery...
I just let myself paint circles, as many as I wanted...I just went ahead and let it happen.' ”

Bridething (or Bride Thing), Carla Knopp

Spawn was also reviewed by Dan Grossman in NUVO Newsweekly on April 15, 2010, where he writes,

“Estrogenie, Ripwreath and Bride Thing are some of the more interesting titles/coinages in this show of Carla Knopp's new paintings. Bride Thing is Knopp's depiction of a sort of wedding bouquet with greenish leaves and towers of red eyeball-like things protruding from it against a flesh-colored background. It's not exactly the kind of thing you'd want to see at your wedding but you have to at least admire the craftsmanship behind it.
Knopp's new paintings are on planes of wood...that she shaped and sanded herself. She takes full advantage of the shapes of her wood surfaces, ovals and pentagons among them, to frame her intuitive compositions.”

Royal Toddler, Carla Knopp

Looking now at the piece Royal Toddler, we see the overall outline of the wood panel shaped in the five lazy curves of a bloated star or portly gingerbread man. Inside the confines of the picture border, is an emergent revolving process of extrusion, rotation, formation and dissimulation. The pushing and pulling of color and form, along with the title, allude an ultrasound of an imperial fetus – with a fourth-dimensional zygote's-eye view of becoming. We see inside and outside, tossing and turning, past, present and future, all at once.

Evolutionary Leftovers.

In November 2011, a new venue for downtown artists opened with an expansion in the Circle City Industrial Complex on Brookside Avenue.

Called the South Studios, the new area of the 13 acre complex hosted artists' studios and exhibition spaces.

Tenants included a founding catalyst in Lug Waku and his 'Studio & Garage' space, painter/sculptor Matthew Davey and Carla Knopp with her new Dewclaw Gallery.

Knopp presented Lane Markers, a new series of paintings, in Dewclaw's first show, which was reviewed by Dan Grossman in NUVO on December 6, 2012. He begins his remarks with comments about the meaning of the gallery's name and its relation to a particular painting,

“A mammalian dewclaw may be vestigial, but it is not without interest from an evolutionary perspective. Accordingly, Carla Knopp's Lane Markers paintings...ruminate on vestigiality, on functionlessness.
Take, for example, Lastrada Estates, where you see termite-mound-like edifices in the foreground. What could they be for, we wonder...
...once you get past the...foreground, there's more to puzzle over. The Estates of this painting, a series of low-slung buildings in the background, could be trailers or mausoleums or something in between...
In...(this) oil on linen (painting) – as well as in the rest of the series – the muted pinks and earth tones contribute to an overall hypnotic effect enhanced by...the metallic ground they are painted on.”

Another painting in the show is one that I collected from the exhibition at the time – Obifia Forest.

Obifia Forest, Carla Knopp

The picture is an oil on linen fantasy landscape. A bare dirt road, glowing and gold, lined with mossy rocks on the way to a deep woods. Aside this path, some unknown structures, one like a leaning gazebo or carousel...

These human handiworks almost fade into a mist of atmosphere despite the highlights on their fanciful fretwork.

Overall, the painting is a tonal study in brown gold metallic and green. It's like a copper corrosion memory patina that brings to mind calliope music and antique Victorian postcards yellowing in the attic.

Dewclaw would go on to host additional exhibits by Knopp including her paintings in Kinkade Meets Turner Paints Sci-Fi With Fanbrush in 2012 and other solo shows by artists including Anita Giddings, Richard Nickolson, George Meluch, Kamilah Gill and Brian Fick over the course of the gallery's run. And the space would also later present tribute exhibitions for Jan Scott Boyer and Greg Brown.

A Somber Respite in Soothing Monochromes.

A late major show of Carla Knopp painted works would also occur at the Circle Center Industrial Complex South Studios in 2016.

In a series of same-sized, small pictures called Foodbox Portals, Knopp paints refrigerators as abstract off-white rectangles blending into minimalist backgrounds of gray and/or brown hazes. The diffuse and dreamy shapes remind of Rothko and his existentialist era.

Knopp presents the old ice box, not as a comfort food custodian stuffed with flavor and delight, but as forlorn doorways to quiet, fading memories – coffin-like vestiges of ancient ads, dust-colored, in stone.

If Samuel Beckett wrote copy for Frigidaire for the Pharaohs, you'd get a picture of the bleak dearth of Knopp's desolate appliance portraits.

Foodbox 15, Carla Knopp

These interesting and difficult works were reviewed by Dan Grossman in NUVO in the September 7, 2016 issue. He described several of the works in detail and some of his impressions are as follow,

“Let's just say that none of the refrigerators depicted here seem to be brand, spanking new, fresh out of the showroom. Foodbox 21 depicts a refrigerator that seems to be swallowed by the wall behind it, covered with multiple layers of decayed paint...Foodbox 22 resembles more a tombstone on a hill – a brown tombstone on a brown hill surrounded by brown sky...Foodbox 9 looks like what an abstract painting might look like if it were painted by Francis Bacon, in its brooding color choices, in its tarry accumulations of black paint. And Foodbox 24 doesn't really look like a food box – or a portal – at all. With its pink off-white color and a slit that verges on the vaginal, it looks like more like an animal carcass on a butcher's table.”

Foodbox 24, Carla Knopp

It might be fitting these paintings serve as a symbolic endpoint for the long analogue phase of Knopp's art career in Indianapolis. And perhaps a portal to what was to follow and continues to this day.

You Can't Put Oil Paint Back in the Tube.

The output of Carla Knopp would not slow down in the ensuing years. Although the numbers of her purely physical painting would diminish, she would reincorporate her ideas in new directions.

Her familiar obsessions would spawn and emerge again in her virtual reality arts which compel her creation now.

Her latest work consists of 3d spaces, or worlds, that must be experienced 'in-game' in the full reality of their VR splendor to be fully appreciated (some links below).

La Loma, Carla Knopp, virtual world screen capture

Entering these worlds, traversing their terrain, teleporting through passageways, standing in grand halls...

There is a feeling of both déjà vu and discovery.

A thread of a whispering song weaves through all of Knopp's art, and remains in her latest virtual works, composed on the computer in a series of zeroes and ones, that when shuffled and compiled, and sorted just so, organize the impossible – nothing and something – into scenes of an inexplicable everything.

Her paintings serve as a diagram of future dreams, Frankensteined to life via microchips and computer code.

A Morning on Earth that never ends, but cycles endlessly like energy in space.

What were once pictures on a wall, are now a hyperdrive of energized frozen moments – millions of flickering movies, on zillions of scrying screens – an art befitting our new electronic era.

But unlike AI, which is a rehash of everything that came before, at least at the time of this writing and until the singularity, Knopp uses modern technology like the Impressionists used the marvelous invention of oil colors in portable tubes.

And for what particular reason is Knopp's to know and her artworks to allude.

The modern artists' code is to break new ground, to go where no one has gone before. Try as you may, progress cannot march in reverse. Like the Impressionists with their new-fangled tubes. Hi ho, hi ho, from inside to outside they go. From studio to field, to capture the ever changing Earth.

Morning on Earth, Carla Knopp, virtual world screen capture

Friday, May 8, 2026

The Art of Carla Knopp - Part Four

Corporeality, Carla Knopp, 1999

Avenue of Lost and Change.

By 1995, the downtown Indianapolis gallery scene was evolving. Places were closing and places were opening on Massachusetts Avenue. Re-locations were occurring away from that Avenue to Vermont Street and Alabama Avenue. Two large art enclaves, also downtown, were gaining steam nearby with the Stutz Building to the west and the Faris Building to the south.

As Carla Knopp continued her decade-long art journey through a changing art world, Steve Mannheimer reflected on the same prior ten years of the downtown Indianapolis art scene up to that point in the mid '90s. His observations were contained in the preamble to his review of two shows opening in April 1995, one of which was at Utrillo Gallery, an upstart space owned and ran by Greg Brown on the city's Near Eastside.

The column's title was Local art scene is still jumping but not on Mass Ave and appeared in the April 9, 1995, Indianapolis Star.

In just a few opening paragraphs, he described the state of the city's contemporary art scene of the prior ten years,

“During the last half of the 1980s, the health of the local art scene was gauged by the traffic through the galleries along Massachusetts Avenue. Opening night block parties did not always generate sales, but the masses on Mass. Ave. created the perception that art was...indispensable...
There was even a sort of local 'school' …, particularly the younger painters, who exhibited on Massachusetts.
It never attained nor aspired to the status of an official Indianapolis style – but...(this group) reinforced some mutual tendencies, toward painterly technique, vaguely disquieting content and a distant kinship to the expressionistic tone of the national scene of the day.
Some of the those galleries have disappeared. Others have evolved. Artists who had hoped those bubbly times would elevate their careers have been mostly disappointed.”

The savvy real estate entrepreneurs and developers had a master plan as early as their first lease on that street to Patrick King in 1983, as covered earlier in this blog. That plan was coming to fruition. It was a common multi-stage plan of gentrification using art and artists as the fuel, an early catalyst, and, like a rocket ship, when the boost of the first stage was spent, they would be shed away, cast off by stratospheric rent hikes, and abandoned to float or sink.

Essential, Folk, Outsider and Found.

So amid the change of this period, Greg Brown's Utrillo Gallery opened in 1995. It would be an important venue for the work of Carla Knopp.

The location at 2630 East 10th Street was in an untapped art area of the Near Eastside.

According to a March 16, 1997, Indianapolis Star feature article about him and his gallery by S. L. Berry, Brown described the plentiful storefronts and cheap rents, and saw not only a prime location for his gallery, but for a future alternative scene to add to Mass Ave area and the loft buildings.

An early and essential show at Utrillo was covered by Steve Mannheimer in the April 9, 1995, Indianapolis Star mentioned above.

That show, World in Balance was an exhibition that,

“...features a dozen or so mobiles and collages by Indianapolis artist Gwendolyn Skaggs...
Gravity provides the only glue. Everything is suspended by a thread or loose wire and hangs together only by the grace of a still room...
Skaggs likes the precariousness of it all."

Mannheimer then quotes the artist and concludes his thoughts,

" 'For each of these objects there is only one direction and one position in which it can hang. It fits my concept of living.'
...Skaggs has created a complete aesthetic: Her method is her metaphor – and vice versa.”

Brown would operate at that location for a couple of years, and then would move locations by 1998 to a building at 3318 East 10th Street.

2630 East 10th Street as it appears today,
location of first Utrillo Gallery

Utrillo's would present what may be the most eclectic range of art and artists in the city during those times, with shows that included the intriguingly titled Sgt. Joe Griffith's Paintings of: The Kennedy Assassination in February 1998, a show of his own paintings called Cardboard and Canvas a few months later, as well as found art, folk art and thrift store art over the following months and years.

Artists, in addition to Carla Knopp, included the quasi-outsider, Harry Blomme, and the iconoclastic self-proclaimed Allist, Jan Scott Boyer.

In a 1998 exhibition, Utrillo Gallery presented Passionate Visions: Contemporary Folk Art of the South, selections from the personal collection of Robert Dawson, an IUPUI media studies teacher.

S.L. Berry of the Indianapolis Star would preview the show in a Visual Arts column on July 21 of that year.

The writer described paintings as the primary focus of Dawson's collection, quoting the collector as follows,

“I especially like memory paintings...things that people paint later in their lives when they're recalling events or experiences or places in their past.”

Berry also quotes Greg Brown about the show,

“The fine art community and the folk art community are starting to understand one another. This show is a conduit for furthering that.”

In March of 1999, Utrillo Gallery would exhibit the found-object creations of homeless outsider, William Talley. Later that same year in August, Greg Brown would exhibit his own collection of thrift shop prints and copies by French street scene painter, Maurice Utrillo, the inspirational namesake of his gallery.

Carla Knopp would exhibit at Utrillo Gallery on several occasions, with painting shows including Villages in 1996, May Flowers in 1997 and American Legion Show in 1999.

She would also co-produce the gallery's public-access TV show with Brown, a further conduit of of connection between the street, outsider and folk art scenes and fine arts in the city.

Mapping the Ineffable in Multi-Dimensions.

Spelunker, Carla Knopp, 1999

It is perhaps fitting that Carla Knopp would show at Utrillo during the gallery's run in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Folk art collector Robert Dawson's description of 'memory painting' might well apply to the surreal landscapes produced by Knopp during this time. But Knopp's paintings, although perhaps personal in part, seemed tapped into a broad and ancient memory bank – or maybe timeless is the better word. A boundless collective store of information – pre-conscious, post-conscious, unconscious, – consisting of an archetypal alien vocabulary of dreamy mysterious hieroglyphs.

During this period, she captures views of un-graspable vistas, not nightmares or unnerving, but strange, pleasant harmonies of color and characters captured from yelping spurs of thought, memory or imagination.

Corporeality, 1999, paints a picture (top of page), labeled with that word, of an all-seeing vine that tangles a grid between a bizarre rounded rise of snow, and a warm-colored sky. A prone snowman of sorts is rolling down a slope toward the viewer. Eerie eyeballs of gray, yellow and orange form a stack of spheres in the 'sky' echoed by the three spheres of the puffy 'snowman' below. It is an inexplicable scene, but of such pleasing colors and soft, rounded forms – two worlds, one painted cold and one colored warm – divided by the bristling vines that guard the wonder of the winter scene from the sunset eyes in the sky.

Spelunker, 1999, (above) alludes to cave exploration, and is an image that could be equally at home on a Robert Heinlein paperback or a shoegaze CD; the muted range of color and the hazy atmosphere, the segmented mechanics of the insectoid reptile to the left and the graceful and organic symmetry of the blinded weedflower to the right.

There is a slight orientation of the interior landscape by a central columnar rocky form, but the scene seems to shift in the distance from a peaceful pastoral in shades of purple to a skull-like menace with an orange orb of an eye, and even into a presiding figure with outstretched arms, if you stare long enough.

Both Corporeality and Spelunker contain the interplay of otherworldly biomorphic vegetation with serene circular forms seen in Knopp's earlier painting, Land of Poetry and Harmless Snakes.

In two additional pictures from the period, we see the glimmering golden green of Arcadian landscapes, populated not by people, but by peculiarities.

Tippi's Water Garden, Carla Knopp, 1999

Tippi's Water Garden, 1999, presents of a small dog, knee-deep in water, at the edge of a pond. A tennis ball floats nearby but the pooch seems to be looking past it. In the waters beyond, perhaps the dog is seeing things. Various animal forms – a bird, a bug, a teddy bear. Teeming things among the moss-covered rocks.

Another greenish gold picture, marvelously funny and charming, is Victorian Gray, 1999. The painting shows a steam-punk flying saucer, decorated with fussy brocade, hovering lopsided above a hilly pasture, seen between two trees.

The 'gray' is a classic alien of the 'man from Mars' type. The being is enclosed in a soap bubble sphere atop the fancy-dress spacecraft – or great grandma's lampshade – whatever the case may be.

Carla Knopp will exhibit less frequently in Indianapolis over the following few years. However, by about 2007, she will appear again with exhibits at several different venues with her ever evolving artworks in the ever evolving art scene, as we shall see in Part 5.

Victorian Gray, Carla Knopp, 1999

Mark Diekhoff, May 2026

Harry Blomme exhibition at Utrillo Gallery article by Mary Lee Pappas, NUVO.net