Wolf Kahn Quotes

People mistakenly think that art is about nature, or about an artists feelings about nature. It is instead a path of enlightenment and pleasure, one of many paths, where nature and the artists feelings are merely raw material.

Keep the childlike vision and remain true to your ideas.

There are many prejudices about art, and first among them is that it is a skill and that there are definite rules.

Painting is a visceral experience, one loaded with subtle information. Only Cezanne could get away with a system.

It is through color changes that we go forward... all decisions come about as the picture is made and in response to painterly demands. The descriptive and anecdotal come second.

Chaos in nature is immediately challenging and forces a good artist to impose some type of order on his or her perception of a site.

I want the people looking at my work to feel a sense of all the possibilities of painting, and, through that, in life as a whole. When that happens, I feel I've accomplished something useful.

The artist's alertness to the coloristic demands of each picture, the ability to respond to the picture's needs, to feed the color until its appetite is satiated; these are the true measures of a colorist's talent.

I like being old, even if the names I hear are more and more unfamiliar. Maybe, to paraphrase Goethe who said that, "Youth is wasted on the young," we should add that "Age can be wasted on the aged," unless one's capacity to wonder increases.

I'm always trying to get to a danger point in color, where color either becomes too sweet or it becomes too harsh, it becomes too noisy or too quiet, and at that point I still want the picture to be strong, forceful, and the carrier of everything that a painting has to have: contrast, drama, austerity.

To be a landscape painter is to be a perverse individual.