In Wolf Kahn’s paintings we see the effective reduction of reality to painting. Paint is light and shade in their most painterly senses. At all times, paint remains paint. This is very Modernist.

In some plein-air work, in some areas of some paintings, paint is transformed to something else. Paint truly seems to become sky. Paint becomes distant trees. Paint becomes snow, or water. But only in snatches and grabs across bodies of work, an inconsistency I’d blame on the moving target, constant changes in lighting, weather, and so forth.

This tough-to-objectify transformation is distinct from what we see in scene painting of the pre-Impressionist 19th, 18th, 17th centuries, where entire images were engineered for the effect of a sense of place (Church), or of an event (Eakins), a season (Bruegel, Hudson River), or for dramatic effect (Rembrandt, Friedrich).

Hudson River paintings don’t read as transformations of paint, for example. They read as skins of reality, as emulsion films, and their overall effect is, perhaps ironically, similar to that of photography.

Exceptions might be the occasional Corot, and likely others that aren’t coming to mind at the moment.

Homer confirms the observation in that his work is always paint. Same with Bellows. Same with Courbet and Manet, but now we’re moving toward the Impressionists, many/most of whom painted plein-air. But even in many Impressionist paintings, the paint remains solidly paint, all through Monet, for example. As with Khan, paint is light and color but always most assuredly paint.

If there’s anything to this, the next thought would be How could the occasional square inches of breakthrough in contemporary plein-air be brought to a larger, more complete reality?