Channeling Wolf Kahn

Backyard Shed

I am practicing with pastels lately, getting ready for a workshop with Wolf Kahn. He is a well-known American landscape painter that pioneered the melding of color field, abstract expressionism and impressionist landscape painting. He excels in using intense, seemingly unnatural colors, that perfectly express the light and weather effects of his subject matter. This weekend he is holding a workshop in pastel at the Yellow Barn Studio and, so to be prepared, I have done a few works of which this is the best example. Since you can’t mix pastels very easily you have to have a good selection of colors. Here I am using Sennelier pastels on a very rough white paper. This forces you to work on broad generalizations and not sweat the details. I like how this work conveys a sense of mysterious deep space behind the shed. The color of the inside of the door is different then the outside which looks a bit strange when the door is open but makes for a more interesting work.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 12:29 pm and is filed under landscape, pastel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.