Wk 13 – Artist Interview – Marty Knop

This week for my thirteenth artist interview in my art class, I had the pleasure of interviewing and experiencing the artist Marty Knop and his work. His art was on display in his exhibit called Printmaking MFA. The aspect of art he specializes in deals with technology in a form called digital printing. It’s always interesting to me to find unique displays of art like this because I find it different and not traditional, like drawing and painting. This has shown me how even something such as technology can revolutionize art to transform it into something totally different and new for all of us to appreciate. Marty stated that he loves to work with digital printing because of the endless possibilities it can provide. This is due to how flexible digital printing can be and how easily it can be used to manipulate data.

Marty went on further discussing his art pieces and going in to detail on how they are created. He states that he determines which color to use by how well the color combinations contrast in relation to one another. This is made possible through his use of acrylic paint, or as Marty refers to it as “flat” paint, and his occasional use of stencils. An important fact about his works in the exhibit is that it all employs the use of mathematics (specifically matrices) combined with the use of technology to give it life. Marty explained that the patterns shown on the works displayed were generated based on matrix equations and then turned to inverse with the colors to create the said patterns. This process is further made possible with the application of algorithms that the computer runs, with some parts of the algorithm his own mixed with snippets of other algorithms to create the three-dimensional pieces. It was all very confusing but I am glad he had the passion to focus intently on his work. Surprisingly, Marty lastly revealed that he limits color use by not mixing colors often to reduce cost and increase efficiency. This was unexpected to me given how colorful all the pieces were.