roots and leaves themselves alone

Welcome spring in all its glory

Roots and leaves themselves alone are these,
Scents brought to men and women from the wild woods and pond-side,
Breast-sorrel and pinks of love, fingers that wind around tighter
than vines,
Gushes from the throats of birds hid in the foliage of trees as the
sun is risen,
Breezes of land and love set from living shores to you on the living
sea, to you O sailors!
Frost-mellow’d berries and Third-month twigs offer’d fresh to young
persons wandering out in the fields when the winter breaks up,
Love-buds put before you and within you whoever you are,
Buds to be unfolded on the old terms,
If you bring the warmth of the sun to them they will open and bring
form, color, perfume, to you,
If you become the aliment and the wet they will become flowers,
fruits, tall branches and trees.

Walt Whitman ~ Leaves of Grass, 1855

Wolf Kahn ~ From Emily Foard’s Photograph II, 2013

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autumnal brushstrokes

A glorious mosaic of gold, orange, and red carpets the green grass of summer…brilliant colors, shapes, and textures only nature could provide…somehow, with each passing year, the transition becomes more beautiful…may these brilliant paintings, with their autumnal brushstrokes, offer you a vibrant echo of the season

Orange, Red, Black ~ Esteban Vicente, 1962

Fruit sur la Tapis Rouge ~ Pierre Bonnard, 1943

Three Red Apples ~ Gustave Courbet, 1871

Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red ~ Mark Rothko, 1949

Red Ridge ~ Wolf Kahn, 2013

Bouquet de Roses D’Inde ~ Bernard Cathelin

Red Across ~ Esteban Vicente, 1996

La Jatte de Citrons ~ Guy Bardone

Bold Color ~ Wolf Kahn, 2011

Orange Downpour ~ Helen Frankenthaier, 1970

Gray, Orange, Black and Red ~ Wolf Kahn, 2013

Bright Orange with Green ~ Peter Joseph, 1988

In the Red Room ~ Edouard Vuillard, 1905

Ochre and Red on Red ~ Mark Rothko, 1954

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a spring day

Henry David Thoreau

1855

April 15, 9 A.M. – To Atkin’s boat-house.

No sun till setting. Another still, moist, overcast day, without sun, but all day a crescent of light, as if breaking away in the north. The waters smooth and full of reflections. A still cloudy day like this is perhaps the best to be on the water. To the clouds, perhaps, we owe both the stillness and the reflections, for the light is in great measure reflected from the water. Robins sing now at 10 A.M. as in the morning, and the phoebe; and pigeon woodpecker’s cackle is heard, and many martins (with white-bellied swallows) are skimming and twittering above the water, perhaps catching the small fuzzy gnats with which the air is filled. The sounds of church bells, at various distances, in Concord and the neighboring towns, sounds very sweet to us on the water this still day. It is the song of the villages heard with the song of the birds.

Three Trees in Spring ~ Claude Monet, 1891

Spring ~ Pablo Picasso, 1956

The Cascade in Spring ~ John Henry Twachtman, 1890-1899

Pasture in Bloom ~ Vincent van Gogh, 1887

The first flowers ~ Paul Gauguin, 1888

“Cool” Series No. 80, Impatient Spring ~ Perle Fine, 1963

Spring at Catou ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1872-1873

Melikhovo at spring ~ Isaac Levitan

Dark and Deep ~ Wolf Kahn

Trees by the Water ~ Paul Cezanne, 1900

Lake, Spring ~ Isaac Levitan, 1898

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autumnal tints

Wishing you a happy weekend!

“How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

Long Barn ~ Wolf Kahn, 2010-2011

Last Glow ~ Wolf Kahn, 2011

Green, Orange and Gray ~ Wolf Kahn, 1997

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a brilliant cheerful yellow

Gently Sloping, 2010, Pastel on paper ~ Wolf Kahn

“Again, I sit on the brow of the orchard, and look northwest down the river valley (at mid-afternoon). There flows, or rests, the calm blue winding river, lake-like, with its smooth silver-plated sides, and wherever weeds extend across it, there too the silver plate bridges it, like a spirit’s bridge across the Styx; but the rippled portions are blue as the sky. This river reposes in the midst of a broad brilliant yellow valley amid green fields and hills and woods, as if, like the Nanking or Yang-ho (or what-not), it flowed through an Oriental Chinese meadow where yellow is the imperial color. The immediate and raised edge of the river, with its willows and button-bushes and polygonums, is a light green, but the immediately adjacent low meadows, where the sedge prevails, is a brilliant cheerful yellow, intensely, incredibly bright, such color as you never see in pictures; yellow of various tints, in the lowest and sedgiest parts deepening to so much color as if gamboge had been rubbed into the meadow there; the most cheering color in all the landscape; shaded with little darker isles of green in the midst of this yellow sea of sedge. Yet it is the bright and cheerful yellow, as of spring, and with nothing in the least autumnal in it. How this contrasts with the adjacent fields of red-top, now fast falling before the scythe! When your attention has been drawn to them, nothing is more charming than the common colors of the earth’s surface.” ~ Henry David Thoreau, August 1st, 1860

Overall Yellow, 2011, Oil on canvas ~ Wolf Kahn

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