Landscape marks

Where the wild things live, Detail
Soft pastel on Arches paper, 58x39cm

I have been going back to my copy of Wolf Kahn's Pastels rather frequently, soaking up some of the markmaking and palette choices of his.

I was intrigued to read more about his approach to landscape as a subject - it resonated on a number of levels, some of which I mentioned before briefly.

1. Landscapes as creating space (I am tempted to talk about the production of space, but then I'm firmly in academic jargon, so I leave that for a moment).

Barbara Novak, in her Introduction (p. 7) talks about it as:

Kahn's art represents the most difficult of closely negotiated mergers between the dialectics of abstract form/color nurtured by [Hans] Hofmann's tutelage and his own pragmatic observation of nature in the 'raw', if not the wild...

Kahn's work is very subtly positioned, perhaps through part of what he calls 'strategies', midway between the demands of nature and those of art.

Bend in the River by Wolf Kahn, 1984
Soft Pastel, 22x30 inches, location unknown

She lists a wide range of key influences including

• George Innes
• Albert Pintham Ryder
• Edward Hopper
• Mark Rothko
• Martin Johnson Heade
• Winslow Homer
• Paul Gauguin, and
• Vincent Van Gogh,

and continues that

The nature of this space is disturbing in its imbalances, impressive in its effects and probably the result not only of artistic intention, but of a subtle push-pull between natural and pictorial spaces that must be mediated. (ibid)

This creating and making of space on a two-dimensional surface is infused by a

2. Sensitivity to mood, climate, light and place - I called that romantic love of nature landscapism before.

- so, the German romantics figure prominently, notably Friedrich Schelling's philosophy and
Caspar David Friedrich's paintings - fertilized, as Novak (p. 11) calls it by Hans Hoffmann's teachings and Kahn's own admiration of modern masters such as Giorgio Morandi, Mark Rothko and Pierre Bonnard. These names suggest

... clues to what [Kahn] is after in his own work: stillness, what he calls 'radiance', and a coloristic experience that, as he says 'ups the ante'. Place becomes meaningful for him when returns to it again and again, to 'deepen the experience'.

Here, soft pastel provides a medium with which to record immediate experience and ability to rely on process - to be worked up later in a more formal process with oil paints. The medium enables Kahn to grapple at once with the subject of nature and its pictorial solution.

• See my previous posts discussing Wolf Kahn, here
• One of my previous posts on concerns over landscape, here

Oh, and then I had an image of myself staring back at me in a weird place on the sidebar, having momentarily forgotten that I had sent it to Casey at Pastel for a guest spot. So, Casey will host a post about my fields, ponds and various reflections shortly, but has announced it yesterday. I am very excited about this - Casey's own work as well as his discussion of Kahn and other Colorists has been hughely important for me to get a sense of the possibilities of pastels.

'Where the wild things live'

- that was Juanita's comment on this drawing. You have seen a small detail of it already and today is the day for all of it*, and some more details.

Where the wild things live, Detail
Pastel on Arches paper, 58x39cm

'Where the wild things live' - I was well chuffed with that title. She got the eeriness and moodiness straight away. I made it a couple of weeks ago when I took more of the handmade Arches paper to draw with pastels. The palette is again similar to the earlier one, but less limited. The marks are drawing marks with some later reworking to calm some areas and to introduce more highlights. It is less sketchy than the previous one, and - at least for me - a fair amount of time working and reworking was spent on it.

I was meaning to write-up more on Wolf Kahn's approach to landscape as subject matter along with this post. But: I left my notes on that in a notebook in Glasgow, while I am - again - in Berlin for a week. So: the WK's landscapisms have to wait a little long.

Do go and visit the wild things in the meantime, though:

Where the wild things live,
Pastel on Arches paper, 58x39cm

* oh, dear, there's a bit of stage fright going on right now:
what if the detail was so much better than the whole piece???

Monotypes of Pond reflections

When I came across Wolf Kahn's monotypes I was intrigued to go back to monotypes. I remembered how difficult I found the painting on the plate - remember my complaints back in autumn here?
I have also been meaning to use oil paints as printing medium rather than the oil-based, washable relief inks I've been using so far.

I am preparing for a couple of oil paintings of the two scenes I'm working on, but I am not quite there yet, I feel. But one way of moving towards these was trying to include some of WK's pigments of choice: notably cadmiums. I had bought cadmium reds and yellows very early on when I started oil painting but have never used them so far. There are a couple of powerful pigments I'm fairly familiar with, notably phtalos - no, that' s not right: I use them in acrylics, but have never used them as oil paints (except dioxazine purple), and I have stayed clear of the cadmiums.

But, yesterday was the day: I prepared a palette, including also a pale violet grey, a pale rose, lime green, prussian and ultramarine blue and some umber to soften this in-your-face-pigment-fest.

I had new copper plates I wanted to try and here are my results:

Trees on Water, Monotype 2
Monotype with oil paints on Tosa Shi paper,
20x15cm



Trees on Water, Monotype 3
Monotype with oil paints on Tosa Shi paper,
20x15cm

I diluted the paint with a mix of turps/stand oil, ended up wetting the paper and with the final, a ghost print, I did quite a lot backdrawing to get most of the ink onto the paper. The mix of paint/medium may need some more experimenting, but I am taken with the marks and the yellows.


I also tried some reductive monotypes: inking up the plate in ultramarine and removing ink to build up the scene - with brushes, painting knives, paper towels, and at points adding more paint (also in black and prussian blue). These are very different, much more abstract and moody. I will try this out more.

Trees on Water, Monotype 4
Monotype with oil paints on Tosa Shi paper,
20x15cm

Drawing with pastel and not painting

Trees in lake, study, 29x21cm
Coloured pencils on cartridge paper

The way I tend to use pastels is very much like paint: I tend to treat the support as a surface made up of different shapes, colour fields rather than developing a piece of art out of lines and linear marks. I also tend to work with pastel board - usually Colorfix board in darkish purple, light blue or anything in between. When I tag my pastel pieces in Flickr or Etsy, I have to remind myself to also label them as 'drawing' not simply as 'painting'.

So, although I work in dry medium I tend to say that I paint with pastels.

Just recently, I begun to draw with them. Not only that but I also reverted back to white paper as support - something I had given up as early as I could leave some sort of semi-competent mark with pastels quite a few years back. Admittedly, the paper I am using now is no longer cartridge but handmade, heavy-weight Arches paper.

And: how wonderful the white paper is and what drawing marks the pastels can make!

You may guess that the inspiration for this has been Wolf Kahn's use of pastels as his plein air medium of choice and my delving deeper into his palette, working process and subject matter.

So, while some smaller studies in pastel and coloured pencils preceeded these (like the one on the top of this page), here are two studies of the Pond Reflections. Both use a fairly limited palette, with greens introduced to the second one.

Pond reflections in Colour , no. 1
Soft pastel on Arches, 58x39 cm



Pond reflections in Colour , no. 2
Soft pastel on Arches, 58x39 cm

It's with these ventures outside comfort zones that I surprise myself: oh, are these really your marks? Your choice of hues? Of building up tension between different marks, hues and shapes?

Hm, maybe ownership isn't the way to approach this... let me think about this a little more.

I've been trying to draw with pastels for a while now and it's slowly building up a repertoire of marks and lines that will stay. It is also interesting to see the different hues that are being introduced - my small travel box now includes very different sticks to last summer - they are much more pigment-laden and full of reds, orange and magentas. Interesting...

Wolf Kahn's monotypes

While still mucking about with the relief prints (and likely to do so for another few months), I had come across these monotypes by Wolf Kahn a while back.

Just last week I had ordered a couple of copper plates to use as plates for some more monotyping experiments. And following Casey's exercise of copying one of WK's paintings to learn more about the process, I think I will put this on my list of things to do.

But, first, take a look at this gallery here which has many of his monotypes on display. I very much like the way how the printing medium provides a different expression in his work.

Neptune Fine Art - Wolf Kahn Monotypes

And in relation to one of the earlier posts regarding naming conventions, Julia Ayres offers the following definition of monotypes and monoprints:

"Monoprint is a term art dealers often use interchangeably with monotype. While the dictionary does not differentiate between the two, in the academic art world, the term monotype is used for work developed on top of an unaltered plate, utilizing its flat surface, whilte monoprint refers to monotype work that also includes elements of another printmaking process such as etching, woodcut, lithography, silk screen and so on."
Julia Ayres, Monotype: mediums and methods for painterly printmaking, Watson-Guptill Publications: New York, 2001, p. 8)

... a short and somewhat lazy post to pick up my Wolf Kahn exploration. But a post nonetheless.

Does anyone know more about his monotypes? What inks does he use, e.g.? Do you know of any publications where these are available? Have seen any IRL?

A bit of learning: Wolf Kahn

Over the past two weeks I've been digging around some work on how to work with water reflections. Most of the digging was done on my sofa with some of the books that had been staring at me for far too long.

Inspired by Lindsay's and Vivien's excellent posts on Kurt Jackson on Watermarks and their respective blogs, I begun with KJ's Thames Project. I still haven't seen any of his paintings in live, but this book already provided a few inspired coffee rounds with M..

But I got stuck: I find his markmaking just utterly fascinating, but it's a wet media markmaking... there is no way I can splash with dry dusty pastels.


So, enter artist #2: Wolf Kahn. I had bought one of his books when Casey's Wolf Kahn project introduced me to his fantastic colourist landscapes which build up so much tension and ambiguity between abstraction and representation that I can look at them forever.

Warm Tones on the River by Wolf Kahn, 1990
Pastel, 11x14 inches
Private Collection, New Mexico

Well, having decided to explore water reflections in dry media (well: mainly pastel) for a little while longer, I've been since reading through WK, had a few email conversations with Casey and begun to find a way of exploring WK's work.

As a start today: his palette. It got me terribly excited. I loved it. And nonetheless it has been a very strange and alien one for me. Hm, I don't quite know if I get the words for it.... let me muddle around for a while on this:

It's colorist - note the omission of the -u-. It's a palette I've come across since in quite a few other Northamerican artists, notably in Tracy Helgeson's oil paintings [I am putting the link to her Sales blog in here as much of her current work involves portraits.]
I am tempted to describe it as a rather cool palette, but that is not right: there's plenty of warm tones sitting next to high chroma cooler hues; so: high chroma is maybe more fitting; it seems rich in phtalos, cobalts and cadmiums. And, other than cobalt blue, these are pigments I haven't used much myself.

Well... I think I can see the difference and particularities but it will probably need a few more iterations to speak of them.

Kahn describes his pastels as immediate responses to - or better still: part of the experiental seeing of - being in landscape (or nature?). They are characterised by marks closely associated with drawing. Rather than using sanded boards, he draws on paper - lightly toned paper.

Diane Townsend's Terrage pastels are said be to be developed with a particulay eye on WK's palette. She carries one set of twelve of WK's favourites, which are these here:


Diane Townsend Terrage Pastels: Wolf Kahn's Favourites

dioxazine purple 188
mars violet 93
red oxide 88
quinacridone magenta 182
blue-violet gray 135
gray 124
ultramarine blue 18
ultramarine blue 20
permanent green 164
cadmium red light 56
cadmium yellow 67
cadmium orange 63

I found this image in the book, it's rather different to many of the others, but it resembled most closely some of the eeriness of my recent pond reflections.

Black Pond i (study) by Wolf Kahn, 1997
Pastel 11x14 inches
Beadleston Gallery, New York

And where is all this getting me to?

A first glimpse is this:

A pastel drawing on white paper with an unfamiliar palette. Hm... Comments to follow once I've made up my mind...

Trees in lake,
Soft pastel on paper, 30x20cm

A few related links:

• See Diane Townsend Pastel website here
• Casey's Wolf Kahn Project at the Colorist here
• Wolf Kahn Pastels by Wolf Kahn. Harry Abrams Publishers, New York, here