Thomas McKnight is an artist somewhat out of sync with his times. Born in 1941 In Lawrence, Kansas, by generation he should have been an early pop artist or a late neo-expressionist. But he came of age artistically during the 1970's, when art had practically done itself in with minimalism and conceptual experimentation. His work, full of color and image, seems to be a reaction to that gray decade.

He spent his junior year in Paris where he developed a life long love of European civilization. After a year of graduate work in art history at Columbia University, McKnight decided against pursuing a career as an art professor or curator. In 1964 he found a job at Time magazine where he would work for eight years, interrupted by a two year stint in the army in Korea. McKnight held many jobs there, beginning as a file clerk and ending up writing advertising copy.

In 1979 in Mykonos, McKnight finally met the muse he had been searching for in Renate, a vacationing Austrian student. The couple married the following year, and Renate moved to America.

In 1994 he was commissioned by the White House to paint the first of three images for President Clinton’s official Christmas card. In the middle of the nineties McKnight deepened his visions, and in the process began to paint larger and more built-up canvases.

McKnight’s work is represented in the permanent collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as in the Smithsonian Institution.

Today, McKnight and his wife live in a large neo-colonial house in the picturesque village of Litchfield, Connecticut. He has converted the top floor to a loft-like studio where he spends most of his time reading, dreaming, and creating pictures of real and imagined Arcadias.