Author Bio:

Holly Knott
Holly Knott Website
Holly Knott Blog
Holly Knot Etsy Shop
Contact me via E-mail

Holly Knott is a Finger Lakes, NY artist who could never call just one medium her own. In 2004, she left behind her 17-year career as an interactive systems designer and usability testing specialist in Princeton, NJ, and moved from Bucks County, PA, to equally beautiful upstate NY so that she could devote 100% of her time to her art. She works in a wide variety of media, including contemporary art quilts, photography, watercolors, acrylics, hand-painted furniture and website design.

Inspiration for her work comes from her surroundings, including her love of colonial and victorian architecture, cityscapes, rural landscapes, historical sites, cottage gardens, nature, and the enchantment of nearby riverside and lakeside towns.

Holly’s contemporary art quilts and photographs have won awards, and her work is exhibited in juried art shows, quilt shows and galleries nationwide. Her work has appeared in several publications, including in her book co-authored with her mother, watercolor painter Diane Knott, “Quilted Garden Delights”, published by C&T Publishing in March 2008, on the cover of the internationally distributed Quilting Arts magazine (Summer 2005), and with two articles that she wrote for Quilting Arts magazine (Summer 2005 and Spring 2007), in the 2007 Syracuse Cultural Workers Women Artist’s Datebook, in the International Quilt Festival’s 2004 Chicago show brochure, and on the cover of St. John’s University alumni brochure, Conversatio, 2003. Central New York’s very own Summer 2007 issue of Life in the Finger Lakes magazine featured her artwork in their “Off the Easel” section.
Holly has also co-authored a book with her mother Diane Knott, a watercolor painter, that has been published by C&T Publishing, called “Quilted Garden Delights.” 8 of Diane’s paintings have been recreated as quilts by Holly.

She is a member of Studio Art Quilt Associates. Holly lives with her husband, Paul, and their 2 cats on a small “farmette” in rural Marcellus, NY, complete with pond and wildlife to inspire.

Artist’s Statement:

All elements of design appeal to me, including color, texture and line, and the play of light.

Creating contemporary art quilts is my newest endeavor that I began in 2000. I consider art quilting to be a method of “creating paintings with a fabric palette.” The wide variety of “painterly” fabrics available, such as the batiks and hand-dyes, really helps provide me with a wonderful palette. You can create layers of color and add sparks of light just as you would in a painting. There’s a challenge in creating a piece of art with only commercially available fabrics, but If I can’t find fabric to fit my needs, I paint my own with textile paints and acrylics, or dye my own. After the initial design is completed, I quilt the piece using a variety of colored threads to add another layer of color, texture and design to the piece – similar to pen-and-ink over a watercolor wash. I also incorporate my photographs into my fabric work.

What does my work mean? What am I trying to say? Usually it’s just as simple as my desire to recreate and record, permanently, some spectacular part of nature, such as a stunning sunset or the curvy lines of a macro closeup of a flower. I love nature and the inspiration it provides us artists – the dappled light in tree leaves… lavender-blue shadows on snow… peeling paint on a rusty red barn… architectural ornaments on old city buildings… colorful reflections in glass… the pattern created by ripples of water lapping at a shoreline. It’s all good.