10" x 14.74"
Pastel
Casey Klahn
Showing posts with label New School Color. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New School Color. Show all posts
23 February, 2014
29 April, 2013
Video Interview of Casey
Here is the premier of the professionally filmed documentary, The Colorist Idea, with Casey Klahn. Film by Kathleen Secrest and Mark Forman.
31 May, 2011
High Country Landscapes
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High Country Prairie
6" x 19.5"
Pastel
Casey Klahn
High Country
6" x 19.5"
Pastel
Casey Klahn
This past month of daily posting has been fun and rewarding. Thanks to everyone who has read faithfully. I'm not done, yet, but at the end of the week I'll be exhibiting at the Spokane ArtFest and the posts will be less than daily. I will give you my report, though, and stay with me for the next few days, please. I will be posting more fresh works, which will all be exhibited in Spokane June 3-5, 2011.
30 May, 2009
Red Tree
@ 4.25" x 6"
Pastel
Casey Klahn
"If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint," Edward Hopper.
Just turned around and noticed that I have @ ten more River Series' for Lorie to photograph. I haven't even gotten every one of the first set posted, yet! My cup runneth over, but in more than just finished artworks. I am learning more in this session than I have in perhaps the past couple of years.
Actually, it looks like twelve new works. A thing I do is, after completing a run of artworks, I will spot a couple of dogs in the lot, and axe those. Then, I will look at the remainder, and axe the two or three weakest paintings, as well. I am a brutal boss to work for...
If I am smart about this series, I will quit on the medium sized works and just focus on large, small and bigger medium works now.
23 February, 2009
Silver Forest Clearing
Pastel
6 3/4 in. x 5 3/5ths in.
Casey Klahn
This is the last image in a series of three. The others were Experimental Colors, and New Pink Ground. I photographed them on the easel and posted about them here.
Remember that Monday is go-to-market day for buying fine art. My originals that are framed and available are posted at caseyklahn.blogspot.com.
04 December, 2008
Riposte -Repost
I am making a fine recovery from my operation on Tuesday. It will be a while before I am 100%, as my medical professional wife and I agree, it would be hard to find a more painful operation to have done. Meanwhile, enjoy a re-posting of this Barn subject essay.
Elijah Shifrin at Art & Critique has written about my barn and rural building subjects in his article, "Casey Klahn: Barns And The Abstract Wizard Of Washington".
Elijah is thoughtfully focused on the abstract qualities of my building paintings. I have carefully tried to avoid being cast as "the barn guy". The reason is that sentiment is so easily attached to this great American symbol, and yet sentiment is bygone content in contemporary art. The challenge has been to de-construct this awe inspiring structure and make it relevant for today's art.
My Barn
Photo: Lorie Klahn
Working against my efforts to keep the barn image down have been a number of forces. Sales, believe it or not, has been a force tugging at my shirt tail. The popularity of this theme and image, the American Gambrel barn, has been so high that sales of anything barn related are a fairly easy turn. The great thematic content that is associated with the barn is reflected by the book cover that has my Red Barn with Ramp image on it: An Anthology of American Literature, by McMichael. Another force is the fact that I live out here in the rural landscape where every farm has a big barn.
Barn Sketch
Pencil
Casey Klahn
Here in Davenport, WA, the barn isn't just American myth writ large, but an actual part of our lives. To be sure, the way of life is changing. The Heath family pioneered this farm at a spot about five minutes walk down canyon from my house. When the internal combustion engine started to replace livestock for locomotion, the farmers were able to build their houses and outbuildings uphill and farther from spring water sources. My family are the third owners of this farm, and the agricultural roots are gradually being eclipsed for a number of reasons. How wonderful for us to not see another house from ours!
Violet Oil Drum
7.5" x 10.5"
Soft Pastel
Casey Klahn
I'm heartened that Elijah has seen the abstract elements that are key to these building paintings. Shapes, colors and position are the content, more than the buildings themselves. Don't get me wrong. I'm as much a sucker for the deep meaning of the American barn as the next guy. My father built a barn once upon a time. And, the building in my iconic painting is my own barn.
Thumbnail of Barn
Pastel
Casey Klahn
The architect who designed the Gambrel barn was a flat out genius. The way the barn structure occupies the open land in rural America is stunning in scope and even vision. My barn, which is no longer used for any working good, occupies a side hill and commands a territorial view. I have some pride in owning it, but the Great Horned Owl that frequents it seems to have a bigger claim by virtue of time spent there.
Behind the Garage
Graphite on Sketch Paper
7" x 8.5"
Casey Klahn
Wolf Kahn uses the barn image a great deal in his work. He has taken it down to the pictorial elements with content that describes the position of the building on a slope or prominence, and elements like through-looking doors and windows, and severe value gradients.
The Heins' Farm
7.5" 15"
Casey Klahn
Private Collection
The story of my Red Barn with Ramp image I have told many times. I received a box of twelve "Wolf Kahn" Terrage pastels made by Diane Townsend, and in a first moment of inspiration I made a very small thumbnail sketch with the colors. It was the barn image just as it is seen on the book cover, except that sketch was about 1 inch square. I was in the moment, entranced by pure color and by the tactile qualities of the big, thick pastel sticks. Abstract shapes were the tools, and color was the content.
Elijah has written a good back story to the barn and building themes. The literary link to The Wizard of Oz is apt. The elemental truth of my surroundings is hard to contradict. Wind, sun, sky and agriculture. Can an artist overcome his environment long enough to forge content that aspires to higher art? I suggest not thinking too hard, but letting the hand and eye draw intuitively. Maybe that's the only way.
Elijah Shifrin at Art & Critique has written about my barn and rural building subjects in his article, "Casey Klahn: Barns And The Abstract Wizard Of Washington".
Elijah is thoughtfully focused on the abstract qualities of my building paintings. I have carefully tried to avoid being cast as "the barn guy". The reason is that sentiment is so easily attached to this great American symbol, and yet sentiment is bygone content in contemporary art. The challenge has been to de-construct this awe inspiring structure and make it relevant for today's art.
Photo: Lorie Klahn
Working against my efforts to keep the barn image down have been a number of forces. Sales, believe it or not, has been a force tugging at my shirt tail. The popularity of this theme and image, the American Gambrel barn, has been so high that sales of anything barn related are a fairly easy turn. The great thematic content that is associated with the barn is reflected by the book cover that has my Red Barn with Ramp image on it: An Anthology of American Literature, by McMichael. Another force is the fact that I live out here in the rural landscape where every farm has a big barn.
Pencil
Casey Klahn
7.5" x 10.5"
Soft Pastel
Casey Klahn
I'm heartened that Elijah has seen the abstract elements that are key to these building paintings. Shapes, colors and position are the content, more than the buildings themselves. Don't get me wrong. I'm as much a sucker for the deep meaning of the American barn as the next guy. My father built a barn once upon a time. And, the building in my iconic painting is my own barn.
Pastel
Casey Klahn
The architect who designed the Gambrel barn was a flat out genius. The way the barn structure occupies the open land in rural America is stunning in scope and even vision. My barn, which is no longer used for any working good, occupies a side hill and commands a territorial view. I have some pride in owning it, but the Great Horned Owl that frequents it seems to have a bigger claim by virtue of time spent there.
Graphite on Sketch Paper
7" x 8.5"
Casey Klahn
Wolf Kahn uses the barn image a great deal in his work. He has taken it down to the pictorial elements with content that describes the position of the building on a slope or prominence, and elements like through-looking doors and windows, and severe value gradients.
7.5" 15"
Casey Klahn
Private Collection
The story of my Red Barn with Ramp image I have told many times. I received a box of twelve "Wolf Kahn" Terrage pastels made by Diane Townsend, and in a first moment of inspiration I made a very small thumbnail sketch with the colors. It was the barn image just as it is seen on the book cover, except that sketch was about 1 inch square. I was in the moment, entranced by pure color and by the tactile qualities of the big, thick pastel sticks. Abstract shapes were the tools, and color was the content.
Elijah has written a good back story to the barn and building themes. The literary link to The Wizard of Oz is apt. The elemental truth of my surroundings is hard to contradict. Wind, sun, sky and agriculture. Can an artist overcome his environment long enough to forge content that aspires to higher art? I suggest not thinking too hard, but letting the hand and eye draw intuitively. Maybe that's the only way.
25 August, 2008
Response to Orange
7.8" x 6"
Pastel
Casey Klahn
6.25" x 9.2"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn
6.5" x 8"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn
In thinking about the Orange post by artist Kate Beck, I wanted to revisit my own responses to orange. None of my artworks shown here are based on orange, but they rely on it to stay together.
Put a different way, orange misused can ruin a color composition. Orange is a poison, or a pleasure - it depends on how you use it. I did some orange based works a few years ago, but I don't have a record of them. They were rather crude, I think, but their color compositions held together.
One comment I'll make about the artworks posted above is that they don't resort to blue or green to counter-poise the orange. I'm happy about that, as those colors are too obvious and I want to say "easy" to turn to when making an orange composition.
Consider this a post where I begin to formulate my ideas on an orange-based series. It has been a long time coming, and I think Kate's post has given me the inspiration to git'r dun.
As a point of reference, here is a page with many Wolf Kahn orange-influenced works. Kahn has admitted that "Orange is a vulgar color, more than a little pushy." It takes an adventurous artist to play with orange!
06 May, 2008
Barn Free
Elijah Shifrin at Art & Critique has written about my barn and rural building subjects in his article, "Casey Klahn: Barns And The Abstract Wizard Of Washington".
Elijah is thoughtfully focused on the abstract qualities of my building paintings. I have carefully tried to avoid being cast as "the barn guy". The reason is that sentiment is so easily attached to this great American symbol, and yet sentiment is bygone content in contemporary art. The challenge has been to de-construct this awe inspiring structure and make it relevant for today's art.
Photo: Lorie Klahn
Working against my efforts to keep the barn image down have been a number of forces. Sales, believe it or not, has been a force tugging at my shirt tail. The popularity of this theme and image, the American Gambrel barn, has been so high that sales of anything barn related are a fairly easy turn. The great thematic content that is associated with the barn is reflected by the book cover that has my Red Barn with Ramp image on it: An Anthology of American Literature, by McMichael. Another force is the fact that I live out here in the rural landscape where every farm has a big barn.
Pencil
Casey Klahn
7.5" x 10.5"
Soft Pastel
Casey Klahn
I'm heartened that Elijah has seen the abstract elements that are key to these building paintings. Shapes, colors and position are the content, more than the buildings themselves. Don't get me wrong. I'm as much a sucker for the deep meaning of the American barn as the next guy. My father built a barn once upon a time. And, the building in my iconic painting is my own barn.
Pastel
Casey Klahn
The architect who designed the Gambrel barn was a flat out genius. The way the barn structure occupies the open land in rural America is stunning in scope and even vision. My barn, which is no longer used for any working good, occupies a side hill and commands a territorial view. I have some pride in owning it, but the Great Horned Owl that frequents it seems to have a bigger claim by virtue of time spent there.
Graphite on Sketch Paper
7" x 8.5"
Casey Klahn
Wolf Kahn uses the barn image a great deal in his work. He has taken it down to the pictorial elements with content that describes the position of the building on a slope or prominence, and elements like through-looking doors and windows, and severe value gradients.
7.5" 15"
Casey Klahn
Private Collection
The story of my Red Barn with Ramp image I have told many times. I received a box of twelve "Wolf Kahn" Terrage pastels made by Diane Townsend, and in a first moment of inspiration I made a very small thumbnail sketch with the colors. It was the barn image just as it is seen on the book cover, except that sketch was about 1 inch square. I was in the moment, entranced by pure color and by the tactile qualities of the big, thick pastel sticks. Abstract shapes were the tools, and color was the content.
Elijah has written a good back story to the barn and building themes. The literary link to The Wizard of Oz is apt. The elemental truth of my surroundings is hard to contradict. Wind, sun, sky and agriculture. Can an artist overcome his environment long enough to forge content that aspires to higher art? I suggest not thinking too hard, but letting the hand and eye draw intuitively. Maybe that's the only way.
02 May, 2008
Art & Critique
The arrival of a critique is a welcome thing for a working artist. Elijah Shifrin at Art & Critique has chosen to render a sensitive review of my abstracted landscapes.
In "Casey Klahn: How to Make Your Audience Weep," the critic sees some uncannily true aspects of my art that I haven't consciously voiced before. He seems to have nailed the elements of my landscapes in deep and psychological terms that unearth my artistic formative years.
How does Shifrin know that I grew up drawing hours and hours a day, in the land of the pouring rain? He writes:
...some of the pieces appear as if seen from behind a car’s front window when it’s raining. Objects (trees) look heavily smudged, lines break down and some areas of color appear to be still in the process of modulation. Second is the use of pure blue reminiscent of the sea; the patches of blue indeed bring to mind large bodies of water. And third is the thick, streaming down lines of the trees, resembling water pipes. All of these characteristics deal with water and raindrops in one way or another.
That large body of water was the Pacific Ocean, where I grew up in the land of giant conifers, and constant rain. The only rainforests in the lower forty-eight states, in fact, where my stomping grounds.
Much is made of the diffused and ambient lighting present in the works by artists of the Northwest School. Tobey, Callahan, Graves, et al. That love of gray, and the tendency to describe light without a direct source, or without cast shadows, has been my style as well. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, eh?
21 April, 2008
Blue Trees in the Middle Distance
@8" x 5"
Pastel
Casey Klahn
Because these latest works do diverge from my New School Color style a little, I am creating a catch phrase for them. So far, I am want to say, "I'm doing landscapes, now". Don't worry, though, the colorist pieces are still being created in my studio.
One thing I discovered recently is that the less detail I give to these distant and middle distant trees, the better I like the painting. Shapes! Color notes! That's the thing.
Via Katherine, and then Robert Genn, comes this quote by Clive Bell:
One thing I discovered recently is that the less detail I give to these distant and middle distant trees, the better I like the painting. Shapes! Color notes! That's the thing.
Via Katherine, and then Robert Genn, comes this quote by Clive Bell:
"Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art."
09 April, 2008
Kahn Bio
The famous American, Wolf Kahn, is an octogenarian who lives in Vermont, and has been involved in the New York art scene for over fifty years. His family fled Germany in 1939 to escape Naziism.
He is considered a member of the "New York School", or a second generation Abstract Expressionist, and studied under Hans Hoffman. His art is collected by top tiered American museums, and is represented by several noteworthy galleries, including the Ameringer-Yohe in NYC.
Mr. Kahn's career can be explored through a number of books, including
Wolf Kahn's America and Wolf Kahn Pastels.
My own affinity with Kahn's work has no relation to our name similarity. When I took up landscape painting, I realized that I had an academic understanding of color, but little experience with it. Did I have that natural ability, or knack, for making colors "sing" that some artists have? There was only one way to find out.
I knew, by the way, that my mother had a way with colors. She wasn't a painter, but she knitted and did various other crafts. My own path was to look intensely at Wolf Kahn's works and seek to understand what he was doing with color that stood out.
Also, the flattened perspectives and vertical lines speak to the formal qualities of modern art, which interests me greatly. One trick I used early in my research was to take a color composition of Kahn's, and turn the wheel one color to the left or right and see what could be done. After doing a few paintings this way, I just evolved my own color ideas. Walked on my own, so to speak.
It bothers me not the least that my pastels look much (or something) like Kahn's artwork. He is a noted master, and derivation is the natural path of art. I am interested in the vision of current artists who are focused on color first. What makes them authentic? Is the contemporary colorist work saying anything that the fauves didn't already say?
My pastels are more like Kahn's oil paintings than his pastels. I am interested in the medium of pastel to the extent that it offers some very new and current content to the art world. Kahn's pastels are more in the realm of drawing. And they are the best of drawing - loose, free, formalistic, and new. They do, however, smack of the traditional study-for-a-painting methods that have been a hallmark of pastel work for years. Nothing wrong with that. Drawing is the original art, and must be connected to the past somehow.
New School Color
Wolf Kahn dot Com
03 March, 2008
Thoughts & Links on Abstract Expressionism & Color Field Painting
18" x 11"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn
CTA
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn
CTA
The popularity of the Abstract Expressionist movement continues today. Although the conventional wisdom wishes to move on, the movement has legs beyond it's supposed demise.
In the light of this, I wish to ask a couple of questions. Why would an artist today wish to identify their work as Abstract Expressionist, when it is considered defunct? Is it actually experiencing a rebirth, then? Do contemporary artists "give a care," as the vernacular has it, whether a movement is alive or dead in order to be associated with it?
Are these contemporaries the ultimate nerds of the art world? Or, are they just blithely ignorant of conventional wisdom, and happy to make art as they please?
My own references to the Abstract Expressionists have been many:
- Helen Frankenthaler (sorry, but I associate you with this school broadly)
- Clyfford Still
- Cy Twombly
- Jackson Pollock
- Mark Rothko
- Wolf Kahn ("second generation")
- Lee Krasner
On a related fresh note, the Smithsonian is loving the Color Field movement right now (through may 26th):
Speaking of color field work, Peter Plagens, at Newsweek, wonders what ever happened to color in contemporary art? Oh please, Palgens! Click on Google and find me, for heaven's sake! If you'd do a little research, you'd see that it is alive and kicking in the New School Color theme.
- A Room with a Hue (MoMA)
06 February, 2008
New School Color - Turquoise Forest
14" x 10"
Soft Pastel
Casey Klahn
I am starting to really get into these turquoise images. More to come...
BTW, we are so snowed in it's ridiculous. My poor wife has been stuck a number of times, and had to ski the mile out to her Chevy Blazer this A.M. The neighbor lady was getting her kids home early from school and got into a white-out going through a "cut" of snow we call a tunnel. She put her hand out the window to touch the snow wall and kept on going at ramming speed!
BTW, we are so snowed in it's ridiculous. My poor wife has been stuck a number of times, and had to ski the mile out to her Chevy Blazer this A.M. The neighbor lady was getting her kids home early from school and got into a white-out going through a "cut" of snow we call a tunnel. She put her hand out the window to touch the snow wall and kept on going at ramming speed!
18 January, 2008
Pastel
Pure Pigment, Paste & Passion - Casey Klahn on the Pastel Medium
All of the action is over at my other blog, pastelsblog dot blogspot dot com, due to my "phase" of creating more realist works. That is, rather than New School Color works, you see.
I did create a keeper in the New School Color genre (you know - my whacked out colorist abstracted landscapes) but don't have it photographed yet. I'm waiting to use the tungsten lights and the D-80 set-up for that jewel, since color accuracy is critical in recording these. Even then, I am only just barely satisfied with the image produced. The evil photograph will never replicate the colorist pastel's myriad of colors and values. Even by shining a light through the back, as is done here on the PC screen.
Now, on a personal note, I have been suffering some health problems just like I did @ two years ago before my Italy trip and had an operation. Long time readers remember that business. No cancer, so calm down. Just pain. It's a "man" thing, to steal a phrase.
So, that's why my posts at The Colorist have been a bit thin lately. On the good side, my physician has offered to do an operation in barter for a painting. His idea. On the negative side, the pain and recovery will be weeks. If it's anything like the last one (picture me in Italy with intense pain) it will knock me out of a few art fairs.
It's hard to say if my studio time will be wiped out, reduced, or maybe increased. And blogging may be curtailed (4-6 weeks, but I'm betting longer) or it may be my only outlet for all things art. Who knows?
Anyway, I haven't decided to have the op, yet, so we'll see what happens. It's not every day you get an operation in barter for an artwork, but the dollar value turns out to be equal. BTW, he's the best doctor around and I've had a number of these guys. And, usually, I enjoy pain tremendously, but in this case I may have to take the bigger pain to relieve the long term pain.
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