Self Portrait with Stocking Cap. 2014.
10.5" x 6.25."
Pastel & Graphite over a Giclée on Arches Paper.
Casey Klahn.
26 December, 2014
24 December, 2014
Merry Christmas. 2014.
Beato Angelico, Madonna of Humility, (1425).
173 x 72 cm
Tempera painting on wood and gold leaf application
National Museum of St. Matthew, Pisa
19 December, 2014
The Hundred
Pink Ladies. 2014.
@12" x 10"
Pastel & Charcoal
Casey Klahn
Here is the latest work in my quest to make 100 florals, all in different styles. So far, so good (mostly). The last 50 are the biggest challenge in trying to find different things to say.
15 December, 2014
08 December, 2014
Workshops Update
Upcoming workshops:
2015
Rock Hill, SC Mar 18-20 / Full. Wait list available.
Mt Vernon, WA / Dakota Pastels Apr 16-18
New York City / with Ellen Eagle and Casey Klahn TBA / June?
Marshfield Hills, MA Aug 10-14
Gainesville, VA Sep 12, 13
Umbria, Italy Oct 7-21
2016
Florence, Italy
Portland, ME
05 December, 2014
What? About the Windowsill.
Windowsill in Winter Light. 2014. 12.5" x 8.5" Pastel & Graphite. Casey Klahn.
03 December, 2014
Movement as an Idea
5 Green Roses. The Ark of Movement. 2014.
10.75" x 10.25"
Pastel, Oil & Graphite
Casey Klahn
Use of the word "ark" is on purpose.
01 December, 2014
Brown Sauce
"There must be no more pictures covered in brown sauce."
Edvard Munch.
A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter. Henri Matisse.
My technique is unreliable... Jim Morgan.
We have our arts so we won't die of truth. Friedrich Nietzsche.
I can explain the picture to you, and you will understand the explanation, but you will not understand the picture. Pablo Picasso.
Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple. Woody Guthrie.
There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain. Georges Braque.
Genius is finding the invisible link between things. Vladimir Nabokov.
Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. Oscar Wilde.
Anyone who says you can't see a thought simply doesn't know art. Wynetka Ann Reynolds.
Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue. Henri Matisse.
Without...love, there can no longer be any dependable criteria of observation and therefore no longer any art. Henri Matisse.
Artwork above:
Self-Portrait (in distress), 1919 / Edvard Munch.
Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway.
Oil on canvas, 151 x 130 cm
29 November, 2014
100 Anti-Florals / Daily
100 Anti-Florals / Daily.
The Sun & the Moon in the Same Northern Orbit. 2014.
13.3" x 9"
Pastel, Oil, Charcoal & Graphite.
Casey Klahn
28 November, 2014
Steal Like An Artist
The Back of a Figurine by Matisse. 2014.
@10" x 8"
Pastel & Charcoal
Casey Klahn
ART THEFT!
Photo by:
Olya Powzaniuk
27 November, 2014
26 November, 2014
25 November, 2014
New Jersey Reverie
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Memories of my workshops in New Jersey / November, 2014.
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| Casey Klahn / Artist's Banners at Crow Creek Farm, Goshen, New Jersey. Studios of Stan Sperlak. Photo: Stan Sperlak. |
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| Casey Klahn / Demo at Crow Creek Farm. Photo: Stan Sperlak. |
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| Casey Klahn / Demo at Stan's Studio. |
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| Casey Klahn / Demo at Christina Debarry's Studio, Florham Park, NJ. |
12 November, 2014
06 November, 2014
05 November, 2014
This'll Be Fun!
New York City.
I'll be in New York to see the Matisse Cut-Outs exhibit at the MoMA in a little over a week. I recently saw about 30 works by Henri Matisse in Russia. I'm still blogging about that trip, but the posts to date are here:
I Ascended Alone.
Vermillion Ideas.
The Cut-Outs began at the Tate, in London. Here is the support for this super-exhibition:
Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs at Tate Modern.
Blue Certainty.
Matisse: Video Support.
Please return here for my reports on this sure-to-be-incredible trip!
03 November, 2014
30 October, 2014
29 October, 2014
26 October, 2014
Anti-Florals
Nocturne with Reds & Blues. 2014.
13" x 10.25."
Pastel, Oil & Graphite.
Casey Klahn
Someone described these new still life paintings as "anti florals." I dig that.
23 October, 2014
19 October, 2014
Think
Pink Single. 2014.
12.75" x 8.25"
Oil, Pastel & Graphite on Paper.
Casey Klahn
Note: not oil pastel!
18 October, 2014
15 October, 2014
Got Milk?
Arrangement with Milk Bottle. 2014.
@11" x 13"
Compressed Charcoal, Pastel & Vine Charcoal
Casey Klahn
10 October, 2014
Neutral Life
5 Neutrals. 2014.
@10.5" x 9"
Pastel, Compressed Charcoal, Oil Stick, Vine Charcoal & Graphite.
Casey Klahn
06 October, 2014
04 October, 2014
Yellow Arrangement
Fluted Vase with Yellow Arrangement. 2014.
11.25" x 9.75."
Pastel, Oil & Graphite
Casey Klahn
Oil bar is used in this work, with soft pastel (the oldest colored medium on Earth) and pencil. It is done from life, although the arrangement was plain tissue paper in a fluted vase.
01 October, 2014
Video: New Works in Floral and Abstract Genres. 2014.
This is my first effort with iMovie. I had lots of fun! The artworks are late 2014 works; the "paint on them is still wet."
28 September, 2014
27 September, 2014
Vermillion Ideas
Light Vermillion
Seville Still-Life, 1910-11.
Oil on canvas.
35" x 46."
Henri Matisse
Detail
Matisse painting Seville Still Life in Spain in 1910. Just as Picasso and other Modernists were appropriating influences from Africa, Islam, and Japan, Matisse here found Moorish design as a way of freeing himself from the particulars of realism. The foreign designs became meat for Modernist ideas. Instead of using values to indicate space, in this canvas Matisse was dedicating himself to the Modernist ethos of the surface and the formal elements, or basic structure, of the picture. Color was his forward element, taking the place of value, and in this way Matisse was a pirate on the open seas of change.
The surrounding patterns of emerald green with crimson notes control the composition, and the China blue chair cover gives visual movement and compliments the orange design of the central tablecloth. Everything supports the negative spaces of high intensity vermillion red. The celebration of negative space reenforces Matisse's idea of the the picture plane as the main thing. This is the essence of Modernism: innovation. We are not looking at Vasari's type of space; Henri Matisse owns a whole new archetype of picture space.
Compare the earlier still life, Crockery on a Table, which was created just ten years before the Seville work.
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Henri Matisse
Crockery on a Table, 1900.
oil on canvas
97 x 82 cm
Matisse is, even in 1900, concerned with design over all else. Here, he has added another length of canvas below the table top to allow the objects to breath in a fully realized space. The extra negative space gives the coffee set an elevated position, and proper importance.
This essay by artist Paul Corio says much about Matisse's colorist ways:
I've been thinking about Matisse a lot lately, for a number of reasons. I'm teaching a color course with a pattern component right now, and needless to say, it's a good time to revisit with a fresh eye a lot of the pictures that I've seen a million times.
Without gushing about his mastery, I'll say this: he was a master. Like his friend Bonnard, he could confound figure and ground without painting abstract pictures; using limited value contrasts to mash objects back into the flattened, shallow space, and using pattern to bring the ground almost all the way up to the picture plane. He could also paint people without making pictures about people, which is a much bigger deal than it sounds like - his figures had no particular psychology to explore, they exist on the same plane (literally and figuratively) as the still-life elements, furniture, textiles, and the other objects and spaces in the pictures. Matisse used color as a leveler of those things, and like all great colorists he made it looks easy, which led (and still leads) many to question the scope of his achievement.
by Paul Corio
25 September, 2014
Brunette
The Expressionist. 2014. The Russian Brunette.
8" x 10.75"
Pastel, Oil, Charcoal & Graphite.
Casey Klahn
Note: soft pastels and oil paint mixed media, rather than oil pastel - another medium altogether! La Carte Card.
24 September, 2014
At Rest
Magpie. 2014. (Shown Flipped Horizontally)
9" x 12"
Charcoal and Compressed White Charcoal on Rough Brown Paper
Casey Klahn
21 September, 2014
I Ascended Alone
Henri Matisse, 1930. Silver gelatin
by Edward Steichen.
Dance, 1910. o/c. 8.5 feet x 12.75 feet. Henri Matisse.
Music, 1910. o/c. 8.5 feet x 12.75 feet. Henri Matisse.
Would they be there? The two great canvases, Dance, and Music, are twin titans that Matisse painted for his patron, Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, in 1910. This August, I went to see these works at the State Hermitage Museum, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. But, I had reason to worry about their whereabouts.
After a day of touring the great museum with Olga, our Russian guide, I was told the Matisse works had been moved to an outer building of the sprawling complex. Russians didn't prefer the Modernists, anyway, and so they were possibly on exhibit at the General Staff building. I had traveled halfway around the world to see the definitive works by the master Henri Matisse, whose influence on me has grown over the past many years. Would both of the canvases be accessible, or perhaps only one of them?
Olga had taken our small group on a whirlwind run through the main museum building, the Winter Palace. Look! There's Michelangelo! Da Vinci and Raphael, puff, p-puff! Huh, wheeze. Now look at Rembrandt - there he goes! It was an atrocious art crime; speeding past masterworks by the greatest artists of world history but never actually looking at them! The idea was to say that you had seen Leonardo; you were in his presence. What did the painting look like? Hell if I know! It was too crowded and I was only afforded a second's audience with the great canvas.
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Ascending the grand staircase of the General Staff Building of The State Hermitage Museum.
Had I come all the way to Russia for nothing?
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I ascended alone the wide, white marble stairway inside the General Staff Building of The Hermitage. After some trouble with language and directions, I had found the place where I hoped to view the great man's art. Up a central line of emerald green glass and through glorious four-story doors, there waited a nearly private exhibit of paintings and sculptures by Henri Matisse. Yes, they were all there.
It seem to me that there was something providential happening. Not only did I see both of the big 1910 canvases by Matisse, but I also enjoyed a rare exhibit of about 30 works by the master, including important paintings such as Harmony in Red and Portrait of The Artist's Wife. In this exhibit, I saw his color, his passion, and his carefree attitude in painting.
"(I paint) to translate my emotions...through color and drawing, which neither the most perfect camera, even in color, nor the cinema, can do." Henri Matisse. 1942 Radio Interview.
Detail: Seville Still Life. Insane Red Color.
This was a life event for me: a long private conversation (art is communication, isn't it?) with the 20th century French Colorist Henri Matisse. Seeing the works in their context, in close proximity to one another, and in regal situation, was an irreplaceable experience. What more can be said with color in new paintings? I can't wait to see.
19 September, 2014
Russian Busker Without Her Hat
The Russian Photo Busker Who Wore No Hat. 2014. @11" x 9." Graphite, tinted with Compressed White Charcoal, Conté, and Pastel, on Blue Saint Armand Old Master Drawing Paper. Casey Klahn.
17 September, 2014
09 September, 2014
Oil Bar Chaos
The French Modernists. 2014. Pastel, Oil & Graphite. 11" x 9." Casey Klahn. Note: soft pastels, oil bar (which is oil paint - not oil pastel) and pencil, on archival rag paper. I think I put some gesso on there with my fingers, too.
02 September, 2014
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