Forrest Knight

Forrest Knight (b. 1990, Dover, NH) is an art educator and painter who works in Madbury, New Hampshire. He graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2013 and from the New York University MFA program in 2024.

His paintings are layered with recent impressions. Media he’s recently seen, distractions, memories, daydreams, stress, and even the waste and debris of the day all interrupt and shape how he sees and makes images. Perception becomes filtered through screens, mixed with fantasy, or used as a small escape.

Recently he has been interested in the comic grotesque — using comical or even vulgar associations to speak about power structures and shared anxieties. His work explores emotional states such as fragility, insignificance, complicity, and burnout.

He is deeply interested in paint itself — the immediacy of mark making, the physical act of painting, and how gestures can hold honesty, awkwardness, humor, or doubt.

Forrest’s artwork was featured in ‘The New Naturalists‘ on view June 13-28, 2026.

“These works emerge through a mixture of observation, digital collage, turn of phrase, bizarre visions caught out of the corner of the eye, and the natural world. Fragments of imagery collide and dissolve, creating spaces that feel simultaneously familiar and uncertain. Through this process, the paintings explore tension between sincerity and irony, chaos and structure, memory and invention.”