challenge, inspiration, why paint? and Wolf Kahn

9x9 pastel

This morning was raining and dreary. I left the house at 6:00 am wondering what will I paint today?  It made me think...does it really matter? The answer is no. My morning plein air sessions are a warm up, a getting the juices flowing before I go to the studio kind of thing. Do I expect beautiful paintings? No. I simply arrive and start with a self imposed assignment designed to stretch me.The challenge is what I love. The amazement when it works.
One thing I always try to keep in mind is that painting isn’t just about selling. It's about the joy of creation. It's a challenge you rise to each day with the love of wondering what is possible today. If you always obsess about the result you will stymie your own growth.


I thought you might like this quote from Wolf Kahn. It was from an article titled “A studio visit with Wolf Kahn” -American Artist  (May 1997-by Jonathan Phillips.)

On the subject of landscape painting, Kahn says, “Avoid cliches when looking for places to study and paint the landscape. Often, when I’m observing a scene I want to paint, I look for chaos. Chaos in nature is immediately challenging and forces a good artist to impose some type of order on his or her perception of a site. When I find a scene that provides that type of challenge, I return to it over and over again, both physically and mentally in the studio, continually searching for new insights.” …
“Edgar Degas observed, `Painting is easy, till you know how,’ and that’s what I try to get younger artists to accept,” Kahn says. “Sometimes it’s very good to make a bad painting. In fact, sometimes I try to get into some real trouble while painting and look to the work itself to show me a way out. … Painting is a visceral experience, one loaded with subtle information.”Only Cezanne could get away with a system,” he says, referring to the artist’s disciplined brush work. Kahn distrusts dogma and didacticism. “There are many prejudices about art,” he notes, “and first among them is that it is a skill and that there are definite rules. I want the people looking at my work to feel a sense of all the possibilities of painting, and, through that, in life as a whole. When that happens, I feel I’ve accomplished something useful.”