june 10 - july 4
reception : june 13, 4 — 6
Saturday, June 13 is a full day with these two.
It begins at 7 am at Mountain Grounds — the Art Cellar has curated the shop’s summer specials menu, and to mark it, Greg and Ben have each hand painted fifty coffee sleeves. The first hundred cups of the morning go out in one.
In the evening, join us at the gallery from 4 - 6 pm to meet the artists and see the show. Wines selected by Peabody’s Wine & Beer Merchants, with a tasting pairing chosen for his exhibition.
And when you have a chef like Ben Knight in town you make sure you’re hungry. Fresh pizzas from his oven, fired on site through the evening.
Two painters, one state, opposite directions. Smith grew up in the Matney community near Valle Crucis and has spent a career painting the High Country's disappearing barns and homesteads — the architecture of a place quietly leaving. Knight, a Chicago native who studied under Larry Poons, layers color and texture until the painting comes up off the canvas, all movement and present tense. Hung together, they hold both ends of the same question — what a place looks like going, and what it feels like to be fully here.
Gregory Smith paints the architecture of a place quietly leaving — the barns, homesteads, and old houses of the High Country, many of them community landmarks, some of them personal ones. The palette is moody and restrained, and the subject is less the building than the atmosphere it is about to take with it. Smith calls paint a medium of infinite properties — fluid, plastic, dimensional — and his pictures put that fluency to quiet, unshowy use.
He comes by the subject honestly. Smith grew up in the Matney community near Valle Crucis and still lives and works there today — he is not painting a discovered landscape but a remembered one, the same ridgelines and outbuildings he has known his whole life. He studied art at Appalachian State and has been a lifetime student since, with deep interests in literature and history that keep finding their way onto the canvas.
The barns are the center of the work, but not its boundary. Smith is also known for richly detailed trompe l'oeil paintings and for historical portraits — Dante and Sitting Bull among them — along with still lifes of antique furniture and regional pottery. The range tells you something: this is a painter interested in what time does to things, whether the thing is a homestead, a face, or an idea.
Ben Knight builds his paintings the way weather builds — layered, gestural, insistently physical. Color and texture accumulate over time until the surface comes up off the canvas, a balance of chaos and control he has been refining for more than twenty years. The pictures are abstract, but they are about something concrete: feeling, thought, and intuition recorded as material fact.
A Chicago native, Knight studied under Larry Poons at the Art Students League before settling into small-town North Carolina, where the studio is only half the story. With Vivian Howard he runs Chef & the Farmer in Kinston and Benny's Big Time Pizzeria in Wilmington — restaurants built on the same instincts as the paintings: color, warmth, and a refusal to do anything by halves.
Knight was recently featured in FRONT BURNER, a group exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art, and his work was selected for the first Art of the State catalogue of North Carolina's most accomplished painters. Twenty years of steady production have placed his paintings in collections across the country. He serves on the boards of the NC Rural Center and the Boys & Girls Club of Lenoir County — and when he is not in the studio or the kitchen, he is courtside, coaching his son's basketball team.