Molly Knobloch is a painter based in Austin, TX. She grew up in Boston, MA, surrounded by the arts in various forms and somehow still entered college thinking she was a business major. Then she took her first painting class. She’s been painting ever since, and has taken her practice from New Orleans to France and finally to sunny Austin. Now she lives in South Austin and makes art in her studio at ContraCommon in Bee Cave, TX. She’s also a lover of long walks with her dog Zuko, nomming on vegan nachos (ask her where the best in town are), visiting local galleries, watching boatloads of reality tv, and hitting local watering holes whenever possible.

My studio practice is about honesty. I enter into a painting without a plan, preparation, or expectation, and I allow the ideas to flow. It’s a process of intuitive action and reaction to color, stroke, and composition. I come back to a similar process most studio sessions: a watery underpainting, an oscillation between paint, oil pastel, and pencil, a feverish pace that always seems to help and hurt in equal measure. But the actions and choices that come from that process can’t be anticipated. Every piece is the product of each minute spent on it and all of the emotions, whims, and experiments I indulge in during that time. It’s both a snapshot of a moment in time and a story of my thoughts during that moment. It has a beginning, middle, and end that unfold the longer you look on. It can’t be anything that it isn’t, it exposes every part of me, and often it’s more than I ever intended. There is no illusion here, no pretension, no studied map, just mark after exploring mark until the undefinable finish.