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Artist Creates Prismatic Paintings with Light and Glass

Stephen Knapp's colorful "lightpaintings" refract white light, turning it into beautiful wall installations.
First Symphony

With a few shards of glass, brackets, and a lightbulb, artist Stephen Knapp transforms walls into luminous fragments of liquid color called "lightpaintings." Unlike light paintings, which are often the products of long-exposure photography, the secret to lightpainting is the use of dichroic glass, a composite of metals, oxides and glass developed by NASA, that acts like a selective prism, transmitting one color and reflecting another. "They don't feel like they're on a flat plane, they feel like they're in a different dimension floating in space," Knapp desribes to The Creators Project. "You get an extraordinary feeling of depth, that this layer is eight or ten inches in front of that layer, which is in front of this layer, which is behind this layer."

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Now, in a new show that opens on April 4, 2015, Knapp's latest works—including a brand new lightpainting called Mining the Psyche—will be on display at the Bascom Gallery in North Carolina.

Into the Narrows

The artist has been sculpting with glass for over 30 years, but his career path changed in 1993 after Chicago's Merchandise Mart asked him to do a major show. His immediate reaction was, "There's no way I can fill up a 5000 sq. ft. showroom with my work." He needed a change, and quickly made a connection with dichroic glass as a new medium to explore. "I decided that this is what I have to do with the rest of my life," he says.

Now his lightpaintings are spread across gallery walls, private collections, or in sprawling outdoor installations that change with the sun. By day The Definition of Possible, a site-specific installation at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute's George C. Gordon Library, looks like a spectral splash of color that wavers throughout the day. By night it's a vibrant lightpainting composed of solid beams of color like the rest of his repertoire.

He can spend days sorting hundreds of different colors into his glass-based palettes before meticulously installing his symphonies of intermingling light beams. At his studio in Princeton, Massachussets, he works with his wife and two assistants to develop new colors and compose new arrangements for his refracted masterpieces. It's an exciting time for Knapp—recently they've begun experimenting with texture, using diamond cutters and grinding wheels to give the swaths of light brand new formal qualities. "I'm very much like the first person that discovered pigment," he says. "There's thousands of years of possibilities to come in working with light like this."

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The Definition of Possible

Done for the Night

Mining the Psyche

The Definition of Possible - Day

Corner Connection

Inner Vision

Inner Vision - Detail

Visit Stephen Knapp's website for more stunning lightpaintings.

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