Leonard Knight was born in 1931, the fourth of six children, on a family farm near Burlington, Vermont. His daily chores—watering vegetables, tilling the land, feeding the pigs—made for a childhood that was, in his own words, “too much work and too little play.”
“Work” included school, which Knight also didn’t particularly enjoy. Feeling uncomfortable and overwhelmed at his small-town high school, he dropped out as a sophomore. When he was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War, the excitement of seeing more of the world gradually gave way to the same anxiety and frustration he felt as a student lost in the shackles of a large and impersonal organization. After his discharge, he settled in California and moved from one odd job to the next, supporting himself as an auto mechanic, salesman, and guitar teacher.
He got his bearings when a visit to his church-going sister in San Diego in 1967 led to a religious awakening. Finding that his newfound appreciation for Christianity did not match the sermons of local preachers, Knight decided to become a preacher himself. Instead of a pulpit, he tried to spread his message by attaching the words “God is Love” to a hot air balloon, but the fabric ripped before he could get it airborne.
Leonard Knight, creator of Salvation Mountain. in July 2010. Photo: Paul Harris/Getty Images.
Undeterred, Knight then came up with the idea of placing his message on a mountainside. Unable to build on a real mountaintop, he decided to build one from scratch. Settling in rural Southern California near Slab City, he worked from 1984 to 1989, gradually pouring layers of cement next to an abandoned riverbed until his work – called Salvation Mountain – was over 50 feet tall.
Such was his determination that when the “mountain” collapsed after four years of construction, he immediately started over. Salvation Mountain number two, a mixture of local clay and straw, proved more durable than its predecessor. The finished work, which is emblazoned with his original slogan “God is Love” and Bible quotations and topped with a large cross, required over 100,000 gallons of paint, most of which was donated by his growing band of admirers.
Part of Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain. Photo: Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images.
He continued to add new elements to the building from the early 1990s until his death in 2014 at the age of 82. In the last years of his life, he lived in the back of his truck and “shared his space,” as the Los Angeles Times wrote in an obituary, with “cats without names, undeterred by the brutal desert heat or the howling wind.”
Knight’s impressive and unusual project made him a local celebrity. According to the Los Angeles TimesHe remains a widely respected figure in the California folk art scene. He has also been the subject of numerous documentaries and even played himself in Sean Penn’s 2007 film Into the wildappears in a scene set on Salvation Mountain.
Part of Leonard Knight’s “Salvation Mountain,” 2002. Photo: David McNew/Getty Images.
“Leonard Knight is one of the greatest visionary artists of all time because his work is so palpably spiritual,” Rebecca Alban-Hoffberger, director of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, which honors self-taught outsider artists, told ABC News in 2002. “It inspires people with and without faith.”
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