WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Sam Knecht: Looking for Light

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

Hillsdale College Emeritus Professor of Art Sam Knecht presents recent landscapes and non-commissioned “character portraits” at a new exhibit. Scenic works range from Hillsdale to the Upper Peninsula to Italy. The exhibit, titled “Looking for Light: Paintings by Sam Knecht,” features paintings in watercolor, oil, and egg tempera. Also included will be some works from his beginnings as an artist. The exhibit will be on display in the gallery through Friday, Nov. 21. For gallery hours, click here.He joins WRFH to discuss. 

This is Megan Lee, and today we are here speaking with Professor Emeritus Sam Kineck about his art exhibition called Looking for Light, Paintings by Sam Kinect, with its opening on Friday, October 17th at 6 p.m. And the exhibit remaining in the Sage Art Building until November 21st. Professor Kinect, thank you so much for taking the time to come here. We're super happy to have you. How does it feel coming back to Hillsdale, not to T. but to put on an art exhibition of your own art. Well, thanks, Megan. It feels great to be in my old haunt, you know,

because I started teaching at the college in 1973. I've had a few shows over the decades here, and this one has been in the planning for a couple of years. So it's really great to feel like a homecoming in the art department and with college colleagues. What goes into putting together an art exhibition? Well, there's a lot of thought. Like, what do I have that would look good together, make some sense to not just the college community, but the Hillsdale community at large?

And I decided in the run up to this show to offer landscapes and character portraits. When you say character portraits, are you talking about people? Oh, yes, yes. I use that term. It's kind of made up to describe paintings that I do, which are not commissioned. It's not a financial arrangement. It's just I've seen somebody. I might know them well or not all that well. It just depends. But I find them interesting, whether in appearance or their story. And I ask to do their portrait, ask permission. And it goes from there. That's wonderful. And you mentioned landscape portraits. I was looking at the press release and it mentioned their landscapes from Hillsdale, from the Upper Peninsula, and from Italy. Yeah, yeah.

Are these all places that you've really enjoyed while traveling to? Oh, absolutely. Well, you know, I enjoy this county, town and the surroundings. There are a number of small oils in the show that I did a year ago during this time of year. With this kind of weather, you know, a stretch of really wonderful sunny days. And you get hop in the car, go out in the dirt roads, find something interesting to paint, set up there and make a painting taking all afternoon. What were some of the other mediums you used in this exhibition? Well, there's, in addition to oil paintings, there are watercolors.

And there are also paintings done in a very unique medium, an old medium called ed. Egg tempera. It's not tempura, like Japanese cooking, but tempera. It's a process that goes back to the Italian Renaissance in the 13-1400s. And when I'm feeling like I can manage the discipline of detail and long stretches of weeks or months to finish a painting, I reach for tempera. Wow. So is this more time-consuming than other... Absolutely. It's ridiculously process intensive. Just preparing a panel and getting it coated with special white substances and then getting it sanded, ivory smooth. It might take 30 hours just to get a panel ready before putting a charcoal mark or a paint on it. And then you mix the paint with egg yolk, water, and dry powdered pigments.

I like to joke that you have to be certifiably nuts to do this. What's kind of the thought process you go through when you're figuring out what medium to assign to a certain painting? Yeah, it's more intuitive than logical. But if I feel like I want to do a landscape in one or maybe two sessions, I'll probably reach for oil paint because of its rich color. and how it's forgiving. You make a mistake, if you catch it right away, you wipe it off, or you cover it up later when the paint's dry and make those corrections.

But sometimes I use watercolor for on-the-spot work, what we call plen air, because it dries fast, and it tends to promote spontaneous attack. and beautiful transparent colors. What are some of your favorite pieces from this exhibition? Oh, boy. That's a good question, Megan. Thank you. Well, I have two character portraits. One of a fellow who is a fixture around Hillsdale for himself the last 50 years.

That's Brian Anderson, who is a great fellow. I've known him since the 70s when he was an art major as well as varsity football player. He is a top-ranking master of taekwondo and coaches taekwondo for the college for many, many years now. He's also a really gifted blues guitarist and has been in a couple of different blues bands in the region. So I bump into Brian from time to time and finally late this winter, I coaxed him into posing for photographs as well as some life sitting for his character portrait. When you find places or people to paint, how do you go about doing that? Well, for example, in the exhibit, I have my portable painting kit set up.

It's a rig with, it looks like a, I don't know, a wooden briefcase. It's called a French easel, and it has legs that fold out three legs, so it's sturdy like a tripod, but it has this box on top that can hold a canvas or a watercolor on a board, and it has an area where you can put your brushes, a palette for mixing, and so on. And that's relatively easy to carry around in a car and then set up. Or in the case of the Italian paintings, it was the kind of... of rig that I could do the French easel as a carry-on and put watercolor paper in my suitcase. And so then it all worked out to go to a special location and set up and paint.

What was your experience in Italy like? Which places did you go to? Well, we were in Rome. My wife, Melissa, Dr. Melissa Connect from the music department. And we were there to hang out after hours with our daughter Lydia, who was, in the spring semester of 2024 in Cornell University's architecture program in Rome. So Melissa and I stayed in an Airbnb. We were able to bring Lydia's twin, Catherine over to stay with us for a week of her spring break. And so we had a little family reunion and we were in the heart of Rome and with its incredible monumental churches, attracted me the most, but even a water fountain, a small sidewalk water fountain caught my attention.

So I like noticing little things, but I also love noticing things that are monumental. And I saw in the press release that this exhibit includes some work from your beginnings as an artist. What are those works? Just two pieces basically. A drawing that I did from magazine photos. depicting it was like a portrait drawing of Andrew Wyeth, an American artist whom I admired and I was smitten by his work while a teenager and my deep regard for his mastery, his emotion and unique skill captivated me ever since. So there's that drawing and then also close to it on the wall is a pen and ink drawing I did of my grandfather in his art studio.

Art was, and painting were his passion, but not his day job, but all lifelong. He kept sketchbooks, did watercolor paintings, oils, and so on. And so in his retirement, he built a studio for himself, and when we'd visit, there'd be an opportunity for just the two of us to go off to his studio and I'd see the latest and greatest on his easel entranced by not just the look of things, but the smell of oil paint. Would you say he was a factor in the beginning of your love for art and your career in art? Yes, yes. My dad who trained as a landscape architect, nevertheless, and he could draw and paint very well, but we had my grandfather's paintings on the walls of the house I grew up in. So that was just part of the environment.

This is Maggie Lee speaking with Professor Emeritus of Art, Sam Connect, talking about his Looking for Light, paintings by Sam Connect exhibit opening on Friday, October 17th at 6 p.m. The exhibit will remain in the Daughtry Art Gallery in the Sage Building through November 21st. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. outside of people and places, are there other things that you enjoy painting? That covers a broad spectrum. I only have one sort of still life in the show. It's a studio setup involving an Italian espresso pot and some other brick-a-brac. And the feature is a big showy Venetian mask with wing shapes,

the jut out from it, which are really pieces of printed music. And in the background of that painting, reflecting in a mirror, there's my face. But in the main, it's a still life. So people, places, still life, those are the three big domains for the painter. You called this exhibit looking for light? What inspired that name? It's inspiring to me because light is I find ever always captivating. I find light to be unique in that it's energy,

it's visual, but for the artist to try to represent light, that presents a kind of conundrum because you cannot possibly with paint, which reflects light, to get the same kind of

intensity of projection, light, such as from the sun or bouncing off objects in nature. So it's a fascinating, never-ending challenge for the artist to come up with ways of interpreting light in a way that seems both truthful and yet also has some strong impact, like, okay, this is a pop of light that really catches your eye. I feel that whenever we look at a photograph or a painting, that our eye is primarily captured by an effective light. You go to the spots of light, and the shadows and the darker tones

serve to embrace those shapes of light. Since you stopped teaching at Hillsdale five years ago, what have you been up to since then? Well, a lot of painting. I feel like the 47 years that I spent teaching art here at the college, earned me the privilege to sort of order my own time and my own schedule. But that schedule is divided between painting and family stuff naturally and also working on our old house.

We have an old Gothic revival, 1860s house, just three blocks from campus. And there's always a project needing to be done. and so I'm pretty handy with carpentry and so those skills are called upon in working on the house also called upon to build occasional frames too like the frames for pictures yeah yeah there are probably 15 paintings or more in the exhibit that that I've designed and built myself

and yet the very best work is custom framed by friends at a family framing business near Toledo. Would you say the frame of a certain painting complements that painting? Well, it not only complements, it must complement. It helps to complete the painting with setting a mood, creating a harmony, and also serving to tunnel the gaze of the viewer into the painting, while not intruding or calling too much attention to itself, it's got to be a supporting actor, not the star.

And so I take framing very, very seriously. My framers and I agonize over decisions until we feel it we've really got it right. Is there a certain painting with its frame in this exhibit that you could kind of walk us through with the process of building that frame, making sure it fits the painting looks like? Well, I guess that speaks to some of the self-built frames.

I've kind of adopted for bigger works and adopted a particular design that is based on some works of Wyeth that I've seen in museums. Very simple, letting the wood be a fine feature like quarter-sawed white oak, delicately staining, the oak and its special patterns can express themselves. And that's a sort of thing I like to harmonize with some of the more remote or rugged landscapes that are in the show. As you're sitting in a certain place doing your painting, what's kind of going through your head? I've heard lots of art

students describe the process as very therapeutic, very peaceful. What is your experience while you're in the moment? I think it's always, when I'm on location, doing a landscape on the spot, I find it a little peaceful, but more than that, I find it thrilling, exciting, like I'm really alive, really tuned in to my surroundings, noticing, noticing little changes, too, if there's a little shift in the weather, time of day, and so on. and then sometimes just the way the light might shift and suddenly spotlights something, that is just ecstatic to notice.

You know, and then once in a while there will be critters that roam around. And sometimes, depending on the spot, humans, that either can be very interesting to chat with briefly or sometimes really annoying. To you, what sets this exhibit apart from the other shows that you've done before at Hillsdale? Well, it has a lot in common with previous shows over the decades, you know, with the interest in landscape and portraits. But in this one, in a few works, I feel like I've really sort of required myself to get off my reservation

and do some things with the painting process. that are more experimental in how the paint gets applied. And my goodness, even dripped or splattered and so on. Just to sort of remind the viewer that there may be a lot of close detailed realism in the painting, but then there's some mess going on. And well, what's the purpose of that? Well, I'll let the viewer decide.

Would you say that your art style is normally precise detail? detail-oriented, if you could describe your style? Well, we're putting up a panel, an explanatory panel in the exhibit, which in part speaks to how I'm all over the place, Megan. I paint fast and loose and sloppy in some works, some of the landscape oils, and sometimes I paint deliberately slow and excessively detailed. So I just look for a kind of intuitive direction to tell me whether this is going to be a marathon or middle of distance or a sprint.

I think there will be something for everyone in this exhibit, both remote like the Italian things, but also close at home here in Hillsdale. Thank you so much, Professor Connect. It was great to talk to you. And thank you, Megan, for having me. This is Megan Lee, and that was Sam Connect, Professor Emeritus of Art, discussing his Looking for Light paintings by Sam Connect exhibit, opening on Friday, October 17th at 6 p.m. The paintings will remain in the Daughtry Art Gallery in the Sage Building through November 21st. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.