He’s best known as a locally-based portrait painter, but Simmie Knox began his career painting abstract works, like A Place: Suspended, which is on display at the Kreeger Museum. The only work by Knox in the museum, the Kreegers saw it at the 32nd Corcoran Biennial in 1971, and purchased the painting.

Knox, 72, is an artist with strong ties to the Washington area. He currently lives and works in Silver Spring, and has been in the area since 1972, when he started teaching at Bowie State University. He has been painting since he was nine, when his teacher would ask him to decorate the classroom for holidays.

He made A Place: Suspended with acrylic paint on cotton canvas, and estimates that a painting like it would take two to three weeks to complete, since he works on more than one at a time.

Knox explains that the motivation behind A Place: Suspended is color. “It’s a piece that I produced because at the time I was really concerned with the movement of color when it’s sprayed as opposed to painted, and the visual effects you could provide,” he says, “[Spraying color] creates a kind of an illusion.”