“What I’m trying to do is to make a place that still looks like a landscape and at the same time doesn’t make you think of a particular place. It makes you think of a texture, or relation of colours. But I’m not willing to give up the idea that underneath all of that, there’s objects.”
— Wolf Khan
(quoted in Wolf Kahn and Six Decades of Color by Scott Indrisek, Blouinartinfo, 28 April 2014)
I think with paintings that are more abstract than not, an anchor to reality gives us a way in, something familiar to help us make sense of and enjoy the unfamiliar or unexpected.
I thrive on the challenge of creating a painting that from a distance looks ‘real’ but up close dissolves into a myriad of small pieces of colour, that tells a different story depending on where you’re standing.
I love the explanation you have provided about one of your motives when you paint:
“I thrive on the challenge of creating a painting that from a distance looks ?real? but up close dissolves into a myriad of small pieces of colour, that tells a different story depending on where you?re standing.”
This really makes sense to me, and it is one of the reasons that I find your work so fascinating. I too paint in a such a way that the landscape comes into focus from ten feet away, but I have not yet figured out how to make it visually interesting from closeup.
The phrase that echoes in my head is “reward close looking”, and I think working in layers and glazing helps this as up close you see lower layers and tiny bits of sometimes unexpected colour. I don’t plan what it’ll be beyond a broad idea of what colours I’ll use; about the only ‘rule’ is not to hide a layer completely. Also consider how you create hard edges, whether these remain or dissolve (become soft edges) up close.