Wolf Kahn 2015

Half Hidden (2013) is crusted with layers of color applied via oil stick. Kahn’s application is frenetic and excited, and the unexpected colors that emerge in the shadowed grove, like electric purple and pale pink, convey energy and never appear misplaced. In the composition, branches reach out horizontally to each other out while their trunks soar up and condense into a great wooded mass. A dark cloud hovers over a white building with an orange roof. The texture of the work brings dimensionality, and echoes the bark on the trees he has composed. A similar scene is rendered in Green Remains (2014), whose large size (66 x 52 inches) makes it even more immersive. In a dense wood, colors are eager to compete for the viewer’s attention and rise to a harmonious chorus in a busy gathering of branches. The marks stream through the work as if evidence of extraordinary celebration, or one can assume that is what Wayne Thiebaud would say, as he once credited Kahn for transporting the ordinary into the marvelous . Indeed this landscape does appear celebratory after having undergone the full Kahn treatment. In addition to these energetic works, Kahn shows his versatility through subdued paintings, notable for their more focused and concentrated palates. Spring Foliage (2014) is a meeting of two masses, color-flecked yellow and pale purple gray, which intersect at a swooping horizontal line. In Across the Green Meadow (2013), a central gray-blue shares a stand of white tree trunks with a separate lime green band. They sit under a butter yellow sky, which could denote both clouds and a pale mid-day sky. Kahn’s signature, painted twice at the bottom of the piece, is rendered in the same white as the trees, and each looks like a small offshoot of his forest.

As Wolf Kahn approaches his 90th year, he continues investigating the landscapes he has devoted years of his life to portraying. One ofAmerica’s most treasured living artists, Kahn has established himself through a steady practice of breathing in vistas, filtering them through his painterly mind, and reproducing enhanced versions. In this new body of work, the images audiences have come to depend on - forests, landscapes, small bodies of water - are renewed with a fresh energy. Neither he nor his audiences ever tire of the beauty he elicits from a stand of trees, a barn, or the intersection of spindly branches and sky. There is unexpected color in Wolf Kahn paintings because he sees the world in an amplified way. It is his burden to translate his unique way of seeing the subject to his viewers. Kahn keeps creating, keeps reinventing, and persists in producing scenes dotted with hues across the spectrum. In fact, Kahn believes more in a drive to produce than in having ideas. After all, what is an idea without its execution? In 1990, he stated, an idea is untrustworthy , and instead relies on what he calls appetite , meaning the motivation to act: First comes the energy needed to propel a normally lazy body into the studio. That is known as the appetite for work. Then the appetite for color is felt the moment one squeezes a certain tube and sees a certain specific green or red issuing forth. Then, the appetite to carry things to completion enables all the private feelings to be worth much more than any idea . A notable component to this new work is that much of it was made with oil sticks. Before, it was impossible to meld the texture of pastel with the rich color of oil, but he has now championed the medium.