- Jo Knox — Artist in Residence
Well, I’ve told you about some of the twenty-somethings around the farm here. Let’s go to the other extreme and introduce you to a seventy-something.
Most folks (especially women) would get upset for me calling them a seventy-something but not Jo, our “Artist in Residence”. She’s kinda cool like that.
She’s had a fascinating life…probably one of the most fascinating ones that I’ve ever met.
Her husband was an Engineer for NASA and she was a reporter for a paper in Cocoa Beach. They were there at “The Cape” during the heyday of the space program and knew some of the astronauts personally.
One of the things that has always fascinated me was the Apollo One fire where the three astronauts were killed. Jo and her husband were living there when that happened, so to be able to hear stories from “behind the scenes” has been really neat.
At some point in her life, she’s also been an editor and a painter. Now she’s come full-circle and paints here at Koinonia. I don’t just mean painting houses and walls and stuff…she’s a PAINTER. People, animals, nature scenes the whole thing.
It’s interesting to set and watch her work. Taking a blank sheet of wall space and turn it into a mural. You can almost feel the creative energies flowing when she picks up a paint brush and daubs on a giant blob of yellow paint and then it somehow transforms itself into a tiger, a bear, a tree or a hundred and one other things.
Jo has been commissioned by the City of Americus to do a mural on two or three of the buildings here. From her description, it sounds like she’s going to be doing an antebellum type scene — you know, something like what would Americus look like during Reconstruction?
I told her I wanted her to include my bicycle trip somehow in the painting — she agreed. So when you come to the farm, make sure you get a chance to meet Jo. And then drive to Americus and look for me on the side of one of the buildings.
I’ll be the old guy on a Penny Farthing.
