LEONARD KNIGHT AND HIS HOT AIR BALLOON
AT SALVATION MOUNTAIN

After working five years in Nebraska building a hot air balloon, Leonard Knight in 1986 drove to Slab City, three miles east of Niland, California to make one final attempt to fly the craft. "And then I came to Slab City with it and we tried it here twenty-five or thirty times if I remember correctly, and I had a lot of people helping me try to put it up. But every time it almost got up, it'd rip, and somebody would fix it, and then it would rip somewhere else. And I knew right then that the balloon was just plain rotting out on me. They told me in Nebraska I made it too big. And I hate to agree with them but they were right. It was too big."

Leonard Knight stayed on at the site, living in a converted truck without electricity, phone or heat, and began creating his monumental "Salvation Mountain."

See http://www.geocities.com/yosemite/5643/

He is featured in Taschen's Fantasy Worlds and Larry Yust's Salvation Mountain: the Art of Leonard Knight, published by the New Leaf Press in Los Angeles.

Several years ago in about 2000, he began constructing an abstract representation of his hot air balloon, which is the focus of this one-man show. For materials he is using adobe, bales of hay, tires, salvaged auto glass, parts of dead trees and acrylic paint. The fantastic structure is located just south of his grand mountain.

Balloon photos courtesy of Larry Yust