Items related to Wolf Kahn's America: An Artist's Travels
The artist shares his unique perspective on the creative process--and many of his own paintings--as he details his journeys across America in search of inspiration while inviting readers to take a peek at his own creative process, recounting the adventures he has had and the people he has met along the way. 15,000 first printing.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review:
A popular painter who claims to hate traveling has written a "travel book" illustrated with his own brightly colored landscapes. What's that all about? Wolf Kahn's America: An Artist's Travels is actually a record of the pleasant American locales Kahn has visited over the past forty-odd years in order to teach a workshop, attend an exhibition of his work or fulfill a commission from a wealthy patron. A refugee from Nazi Germany, born in 1927, he understandably prefers the comforts of home to the anxieties of travel. Yet he finds visual inspiration everywhere he goes, even in a restaurant parking lot overlooking a marsh. Kahn gracefully interweaves studio shop talk about color with brief observations about specific landscapes and the inevitable mishaps of travel. The book includes 100 full-color reproductions of his gentle, quasi-abstract renderings of barns and dunes, woods and shorelines, sunsets and snowy fields. The painting sites range from Maine to Florida, with excursions to Yosemite and New Mexico, but Kahn's high-keyed colors and favored compositional devices vary only slightly. Although he studied with Hans Hofmann and writes of friendships with other major American painters, his own work has a prettified quality at odds with his peers. One of the challenges of landscape painting, he writes, is to find locales "where comfort and subject coincide." Kahn's most self-revealing moment occurs when he asks Fairfield Porter why he painted a gas tank in the foreground of a Maine landscape. Porter replies that the tank was in his field of vision and he doesn't want to "censor" landscape. Kahn writes that he respects this point of view, but "I certainly would have kept the gas tank out." —-Cathy Curtis
About the Author:
Wolf Kahn is one of America's best-loved artists. Although based in New York, he also teaches master classes in painting and pastels throughout the country. John Updike is one of America's most highly regarded writers. He is the author of many novels, as well as poetry, essays, and literary criticism.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherAmeringer McEnery Yohe
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 0810945479
- ISBN 13 9780810945470
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- IllustratorWolf Kahn
- Rating
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantIf you know the book but cannot find it on AbeBooks, we can automatically search for it on your behalf as new inventory is added. If it is added to AbeBooks by one of our member booksellers, we will notify you!
Create a Want