Kat Knutsen

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Kat Knutsen Artist, Art professor & Creative gathering coordinator. Kat works with traditional oil painting, mural design, drawing and animation.

As an artist Kat Knutsen uses her life experience and passion for learning works to create visual art designs.

The more I learn about history, the more I realize how deeply the past continues to shape our present.Working on this pa...
10/13/2026

The more I learn about history, the more I realize how deeply the past continues to shape our present.

Working on this painting has taken me down a path of discovery, from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the far-reaching consequences of imperialism, colonialism, and the political decisions made generations before us.

What has struck me most is how the ambitions of powerful institutions can ripple across centuries, shaping borders, identities, conflicts, and the lives of people who had no voice in those decisions.

And yet, history isn’t just something that happened to us. It’s something we continue to participate in.

We inherit the consequences of decisions we never made, but we still have a choice in how we respond to them.

We can perpetuate division, or we can recognize our shared humanity. We can allow fear and resentment to shape the future, or we can choose compassion, understanding, and solidarity.

In this painting, the figures coming together represent that possibility. Not the erasure of history or our differences, but the recognition that peace requires us to see one another as human beings first.

The fallen figures below serve as a reminder of the human cost of greed and the pursuit of power.

I’m still learning, still painting, and still reflecting on the complicated history that brought us here.

But one thought continues to guide this work:

We cannot rewrite the past, but we can refuse to repeat its cruelties.

And perhaps that is where real change begins. 🕊️

TheSirenScene

Demo-ing a quick multi-figure sketch for drawing students today. We were talking about using scale and perspective to pl...
10/08/2026

Demo-ing a quick multi-figure sketch for drawing students today. We were talking about using scale and perspective to place figures in a basic setting.

Drawing alongside my students as they take their first unit review. We’re learning about thumbnail designs, scaling up w...
10/07/2026

Drawing alongside my students as they take their first unit review. We’re learning about thumbnail designs, scaling up with the natural grid, and capturing basic forms.

Playing with shapes while reading the news
10/02/2026

Playing with shapes while reading the news

Having fun drawing squirrels
09/30/2026

Having fun drawing squirrels

Painting update.This work continues to grow as I read through the history surrounding Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, ...
09/27/2026

Painting update.

This work continues to grow as I read through the history surrounding Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, and the ways imperial policy reshaped life on the ground long before the full consequences were visible. I keep returning to how power often presents itself as “order”, while quietly building systems of displacement, exclusion, and control.

What began in one historical context shifts in time. Those same administrative structures echo forward into the present, including here in the United States, where immigration enforcement and racialized suspicion reveal how prejudice can still move through institutions that claim neutrality.

This painting is becoming a meditation on that continuity, on the long arc between colonial power, legal systems, and lived human consequence.

But it is also becoming something else:
a reminder that repressive systems are not invincible.

Another figure will be added soon at the end of the composition, one that points toward the intensifying conditions in the U.S., but also toward the truth that when people recognize one another, stand together, and refuse division, oppressive structures begin to crack, and tyrannical administrations begin to fall.

Unity changes the balance.
And when unity holds, repression collapses.

What might have happened if the promises of the early 20th century had been made with greater care?During World War I, B...
09/25/2026

What might have happened if the promises of the early 20th century had been made with greater care?

During World War I, Britain was making decisions about a region still under Ottoman rule. In the 1915–16 Hussein–McMahon correspondence, British officials discussed support for Arab independence, though whether Palestine was included became a lasting point of dispute.

Then, in 1917, the Balfour Declaration announced British support for “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, while also stating that the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish population should not be prejudiced. These competing aspirations were later folded into the British Mandate for Palestine, which formally charged Britain with facilitating a Jewish national home while safeguarding the rights of all inhabitants.

More than a century later, hindsight makes one thing painfully clear: promises made by powerful governments can outlive the people who made them.

The handshake in the middle is of different parts of humanity recognizing itself in unity, and dismantling imperialism’s bureaucratic approach.

Perhaps peace begins when history is no longer used only as a weapon, but also as a warning.

Today we talked about playing with wandering forms
09/24/2026

Today we talked about playing with wandering forms

In Drawing I, we’re learning to see beyond the object and identify the simple forms underneath.We’re practicing how to f...
09/22/2026

In Drawing I, we’re learning to see beyond the object and identify the simple forms underneath.

We’re practicing how to find the main axis of a form, understand the axis of an ellipse, and use those structural clues to build volume and perspective.

From there, we’re beginning to combine simple forms together, discovering how complex objects can be understood as a collection of boxes, cylinders, spheres, cones, and other basic structures.

A little historical context behind this painting in progress.The modern political landscape of Palestine was deeply shap...
09/22/2026

A little historical context behind this painting in progress.

The modern political landscape of Palestine was deeply shaped during and after World War I, as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and European powers negotiated control of the region.

The Hussein–McMahon correspondence, Sykes–Picot Agreement, Balfour Declaration, and later British Mandate for Palestine created overlapping promises and competing political interests whose consequences would extend far beyond the war itself.

Before today’s borders, Britain made promises it could not reconcile.

Arab leaders were given assurances of independence. Then came the Sykes–Picot Agreement, dividing influence across the region, followed by the Balfour Declaration, supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine. The meaning and territorial scope of those earlier Arab assurances were later fiercely disputed.

Palestinian people were left to live inside the consequences of decisions made by an empire far from their homes.

This painting explores what could happen if there were better diplomatic bridges between religion, race and gender… bridges that were able to surpass what has come from imperialistic greed.

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