Busacca Gallery

Original oil painting on linen. Unframed. This was inspired by a park in Wimbledon, London, UK. Scott Kahn is a painter based in Connecticut and New York. Kahn creates landscapes, still-life and portraits that comprise a combination of detailed yet slightly gestural brushstrokes while utilizing sharp, juxtaposing perspectives, creating dream-like overtones. For the artist, painting is a visual diary. These colorfully riveting, foreshortened environments serve as lyrical metaphors for what one sees. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1946. I consider my work to be a visual diary of my life. B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from Rutgers. One year at the Art Student's League, Stamos class. Seven one man shows in New York, numerous group shows, and a retrospective in 2004 at the Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Recent exhibition at the Rona Gallery in London, group shows at Lesley Heller Gallery in New York, Galleries Maurice Sternberg in Chicago, and Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara, CA., Seven one man shows in New York. In numerous public and private collections. The Artist Scott Kahn: I consider my work to be a visual diary, a record of my life, a reporting of the places and people I encounter. It is not easy to begin a painting, despite the variety and complexity of the world. It is important to me to have a reason to paint, for the impulse to be strong. If I do not feel compelled to work, how can I expect the viewer to respond to what I am reporting? If I am successful, hopefully, the painting will have depth, poetry, and honesty. The effect should be direct and clear. To achieve this result, a creative person calls upon every tool available to him: technical, emotional, intuitive, and intellectual. The act of creating, therefore, teaches us and reveals to us who we are and our relationship to life. This is why I paint.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landscape_art

Landscape art is the depiction in art of landscapes, natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions, and develop when there is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects. The two main traditions spring from Western painting and Chinese art, going back well over a thousand years.



The recognition of a spiritual element in landscape art is present form its beginnings in East Asian art, drawing on Daoism and other philosophical traditions, but in the West only becomes explicit with Romanticism.



The word "landscape" entered the modern English language as landskip (variously spelt), an anglicization of the Dutch landschap, around the start of the 17th century, purely as a term for works of art, with its first use as a word for a painting in 1598. Within a few decades it was used to describe vistas in poetry, and eventually as a term for real views. However the cognate term landscaef or landskipe for a cleared patch of land had existed in Old English, though it is not recorded from Middle English. Landscape views in art may be entirely imaginary, or copied from reality with varying degrees of accuracy. If the primary purpose of a picture is to depict an actual, specific place, especially including buildings prominently, it is called a topographical view. Such views, extremely common as prints in the West, are often seen as inferior to fine art landscapes, although the distinction is not always meaningful; similar prejudices existed in Chinese art, where literati painting usually depicted imaginary views, while professional court artists painted real views, often including palaces and cities.