Orange Barn 2010

Wolf Kahn's "Orange Barn" is a pastel drawing that captures a rural scene with a vibrant and dreamlike quality. You can see the pastel has been applied in layers with a kind of soft, feathery touch. It's the kind of mark making that suggests the work was built up slowly, intuitively, where Kahn might have been responding to the image as it emerged. The texture feels soft and chalky, and the colors are luminous – that juicy orange of the barn against the hazy blue sky. See how the ground is scumbled in pinks and yellows, colors that bleed into each other? The whole image feels like a memory, a fleeting impression of light and color, and that one dark window in the barn is like a focal point, a place for the eye to rest. Kahn was a master of color and atmosphere, and I’m reminded of Milton Avery who also shared an ability to capture a landscape and reduce it to a set of flat, interlocking color planes. But the thing about paintings is that they are never quite "finished," they're always open to new readings and interpretations.