University of Delaware Office of Public Relations The Messenger Vol. 5, No. 3/1996 Portrait of an Artist Simmie Knox's career as a professional portrait artist really began in fourth grade on an Alabama playing field when he was hit in the face with a baseball. Knox, Delaware '67, was a standout ballplayer. He would have stood out even more if one of his playmates hadn't been Hank Aaron, later to become major league's all-time home run hitter. In those days during the early 1940s, they practiced with bottle tops and broom handles. "When you've played with bottle caps, baseballs are like basketballs," remembers Knox. "It was a cinch." Except for the day the ball cracked him in the eye. A doctor said Knox needed some kind of steady activity to train his vision and heal the damage, so the nuns at Heart of Mary grade school in Mobile pointed him toward drawing. Knox started with the Stations of the Cross, impressed the nuns and, before long, became the "go-to" guy for artwork. There was just one problem. Black students in the deep South weren't supposed to be interested in art, let alone be allowed to take art classes. Therefore, there was no formal instruction for Knox. Instead, the nuns arranged for impromptu, Saturday morning drawing sessions with the postal carrier. Knox has been drawing and painting ever since. Today, he makes as much as $60,000 for a portrait, with commissions averaging $10,000 to $15,000. He's one of two or three African-American artists in the Washington, D.C., area who make a living exclusively from painting, he says. And, his patrons range from Muhammad Ali to Bill Cosby, from former New York City Mayor David Dinkins to the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Marshall, one of the most well-known figures in the history of civil rights in America, became in 1967 the first African- American Supreme Court Justice. When selected to paint Marshall's official portrait, Knox produced a startlingly vital likeness, now on display in the U.S. Supreme Court Building. He also made it a study of the man whose strength helped reshape a nation, made it the kind of place where black kids can be enrolled in art classes. "He liked the painting, kept it behind his desk. He joked that he always wanted to be known as a 'hanging judge,'" Knox recalls. A father of three, Knox says he's proud that he's managed to develop his art into a successful and secure business. "It's a tough way to make a living," he says. "The only way I've managed is by working hard. There's no such thing as an off day, not in the last 15 years." His studio location helps, too, Knox says. "D.C. and portraiture seem to go together." "You never know where the next commission is coming from," admits Knox, "but there's just something good about being able to pull it off." Before devoting full time to his art in 1981, Knox taught part time in high schools and colleges. He was an administrator and a curator. He studied abstract art and then rejected it, in favor of his inborn facility for representational art. Forbidden in grade school, discouraged later, that facility had been embraced in perhaps only one place-in Newark, Del., where Knox studied to become a high-school teacher. "It didn't really come together till I got to the University of Delaware," says Knox, who particularly recalls the teaching of art faculty members, Charles Rowe and Byron Shurtleff. At Delaware, Knox also studied biology, an interest reflected in his anatomically correct figures and his lingering flirtation with floral watercolors. Mostly oil-on-linen, Knox's portraits are certainly lifelike, but they're more than that. His colors shine. His compositions make statements, declare moods. "It's the touch of the human hand," explains the artist. "Sometimes, people say I paint like a photograph, and I say 'Well, maybe I haven't succeeded yet,' because the photograph is limited to the technology." If it's the touch of the human hand that distinguishes Knox's realism, his depictions of human hands are worth inspection in and of themselves. As you might expect, they're unusually true to life, a skill that the perfectionist Knox says he honed at UD, with the aid of a friend who would come to his dorm every night and "sit" while Knox went through his "practice, practice, practice, practice." Knox still has the sketches. And, the hands he creates also are so expressive. One of his favorite early works depicts African-American farm laborers in a blazing Southern landscape, their hands gnarled-the physical epitome of labor. More recent is a montage of himself and his kids, his theme being the bond between fathers and their children, as opposed to the more conventional maternal union. Binding his composition together is a rope of interlocking hands. You wonder what he'll do with the mighty hands of Hank Aaron, his current subject for a montage Knox is assembling from photographs collected over the years. "For a man to have that much conviction," muses Knox, "to go out and play baseball when, in those days, to cut school and play baseball meant the principal would whip you, your father would whip you, your mother would whip you." His sentence trails away, but his admiration is clear-an admiration that obviously stems from more than personal acquaintance. It's an admiration for a fierce and total commitment, for a determination to have the skills of life at the center of life, and, for want of a better phrase, "to pull it off." -Steven O'Connor, Delaware '95PhD