08/18/2026
When Summit County Land Bank asked us to curate the art for their new space, our team knew we had to honor the building's history through John S. Knight and his first wife, Katherine. Their history lives, in part, through original oil paintings still hanging in daughter-in-law Cynthia Knight's home. Moving them wasn't an option. So we found another way.
Photographer Tim Fitzwater captured each piece in the home in high resolution, preserving every brushstroke, shadow, and subtle shift in color.
We printed giclées on canvas, museum-quality prints made with archival inks to capture the detail and color of the original. They gave us the visual accuracy, so we could rebuild the texture by hand.
Then came the part that changed everything.
Our own Jon Haidet of Hazel Tree hand-applied layers of gesso to each print. Not as a primer, but as a sculptural tool. He studied the originals and rebuilt their surface: the raised brushstrokes, the uneven edges, the places where paint once held more weight.
Gesso works here because it gives the print dimension. Without it, a giclée is visually accurate but physically flat. With it, light catches the surface the way it does on real oil paint, creating depth, movement, and variation that your eye reads as original.
The result is a building that carries its history forward instead of just displaying it. Katherine and John Knight's presence isn't a plaque or a placeholder. It's on the walls, catching light the way it always has, keeping the space honest about where it came from.
