Used to spending 10 hours in the studio at a stretch, Kahn still works every day. I didn’t want to be a descriptive artist.” His work synthesizes his early training with New York abstract expressionist giant Hans Hofmann (Kahn was his studio assistant), the palettes of Matisse and Bonnard, the sweeping bands of color of Rothko and the color-field painters and the atmospheric qualities of American impressionism. As soon as you have a brush in your hand you have a tool that’s going to make you descriptive. “I’m interested in an overriding rhythm,” he says. Kahn is producing the most energetically confident paintings of his long career. “Of course, you know, only after 70 years does that appear.” “Always gnawing on the same bone allows me to have a coherent development,” he told me on a recent visit. And despite the apparent uniformity of his instantly recognizable work, he continues to open new territories to mine within it. Kahn still spends four months of the year painting the landscape of West Brattleboro. Early twentieth-century farm tools, that still see use, share the space with trays of pastels, bottles of paint thinner and “El Pico” coffee cans blooming with brushes. The Vermont house and studio where Wolf Kahn has lived and worked each summer since 1968 is a study in painterly persistence as well as a coincidence of opposites. “The most important thing for a painter is the capacity to feel and express enthusiasm.” “Enthusiasm, you know, means to be inspired by the gods.” At nearly 88, eminent American painter Wolf Kahn’s blue eyes smolder with impish vitality. Wolf Kahn, Trees Against Magenta, 2014, oil on canvas, 40 x 52″.
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