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Lot Essay
Painted in 1993, Scott Kahn’s Pennsylvania New Jersey Border bristles with spectral drama. Inspired by a winter drive through the Delaware Water Gap, the scene captures a sharp bend in the river, which sweeps dramatically through a thickly forested mountain ridge towards a hidden vanishing point. Around it, bare trees tangle and fork, exhaling great plumes of silver-grey mist. As with many of Kahn’s most successful paintings, the work exhibits a deep appreciation for a natural world which is at once atmospheric and bewitching. Though devoid of human presence, it is alive with processes of natural regeneration. Beneath smouldering clouds and black singed branches, newly sprouted shrubs decorate the straw-coloured banks of the waterway, breathing new life into the landscape. Recently achieving explosive global success in the art market at the age of seventy, the Massachusetts-born artist is widely known for his figurative, magic realist style. He conjures distinctly uncanny landscapes, still lifes, portraits and interiors, drawing not only from direct observation, but from memory, dream and imagination.
Born in 1947, Kahn received his BFA from University of Pennsylvania—its West Philadelphia campus itself just a few miles from the New Jersey border—and MFA from Rutgers University. The artist spent his early career with a focus on abstraction. While studying under Theodoros Stamos at the Art Students League, New York in 1968, he encountered first-generation Abstract Expressionists such as Mark Rothko. It was Kahn’s relocation to Sag Harbor in Long Island, however, that precipitated his turn to figuration. ‘There I began to paint from life’, he recalled. ‘This was my true education’ (S. Kahn quoted in ‘Artist Spotlight: Scott Kahn’, Bridgeman Images, 7 December 2021, online). Capturing the minutiae of his surroundings, from each individual leaf and stone to the quality of light and effects of each changing season, Kahn’s surfaces teem with detail. He applies oil paint in meticulous stipples of colour—a spontaneous method that owes much to the technical innovations of Impressionism and Pointillism. Admiring the work of Degas and Bonnard, it is van Gogh whom the artist cites his major influence: ‘When you see one of his paintings, it’s like there is no distance between your soul and the artist’s soul’ he has said. ‘It’s that straightforward and direct’ (S. Kahn quoted in ‘Interviews we love: Scott Kahn’, RDN Arts, 2 June 2021, online).
Deeply perceptive, Kahn’s work is, in his own words, ‘inspired by my life as I live it’ (S. Kahn quoted in, ‘Artist Spotlight: Scott Kahn’, Bridgeman Images, 7 December 2021, online). Each canvas constitutes a visual record not only of his physical environment, but an inner mood. Working in this diaristic, autobiographical mode, Kahn constructs worlds that are hinged in reality and yet loose and faraway. Leitmotifs recur across his paintings—instantly recognisable here are his low billowing clouds—weaving a thread of familiarity throughout his oeuvre. He often paints scenes summoned from reminiscence, reverie and fantasy, drawing parallels with early-20th century Surrealist invocations of the uncanny, the ‘familiar made strange’. Glimpsed as though from his car window, Pennsylvania New Jersey Border is alive with a rush of sensation, and demonstrates the artist’s widely recognised mastery of atmosphere.
Born in 1947, Kahn received his BFA from University of Pennsylvania—its West Philadelphia campus itself just a few miles from the New Jersey border—and MFA from Rutgers University. The artist spent his early career with a focus on abstraction. While studying under Theodoros Stamos at the Art Students League, New York in 1968, he encountered first-generation Abstract Expressionists such as Mark Rothko. It was Kahn’s relocation to Sag Harbor in Long Island, however, that precipitated his turn to figuration. ‘There I began to paint from life’, he recalled. ‘This was my true education’ (S. Kahn quoted in ‘Artist Spotlight: Scott Kahn’, Bridgeman Images, 7 December 2021, online). Capturing the minutiae of his surroundings, from each individual leaf and stone to the quality of light and effects of each changing season, Kahn’s surfaces teem with detail. He applies oil paint in meticulous stipples of colour—a spontaneous method that owes much to the technical innovations of Impressionism and Pointillism. Admiring the work of Degas and Bonnard, it is van Gogh whom the artist cites his major influence: ‘When you see one of his paintings, it’s like there is no distance between your soul and the artist’s soul’ he has said. ‘It’s that straightforward and direct’ (S. Kahn quoted in ‘Interviews we love: Scott Kahn’, RDN Arts, 2 June 2021, online).
Deeply perceptive, Kahn’s work is, in his own words, ‘inspired by my life as I live it’ (S. Kahn quoted in, ‘Artist Spotlight: Scott Kahn’, Bridgeman Images, 7 December 2021, online). Each canvas constitutes a visual record not only of his physical environment, but an inner mood. Working in this diaristic, autobiographical mode, Kahn constructs worlds that are hinged in reality and yet loose and faraway. Leitmotifs recur across his paintings—instantly recognisable here are his low billowing clouds—weaving a thread of familiarity throughout his oeuvre. He often paints scenes summoned from reminiscence, reverie and fantasy, drawing parallels with early-20th century Surrealist invocations of the uncanny, the ‘familiar made strange’. Glimpsed as though from his car window, Pennsylvania New Jersey Border is alive with a rush of sensation, and demonstrates the artist’s widely recognised mastery of atmosphere.