Cecily Kahn
Cecily Kahn was born in New York City in 1959 and was raised in a family of artists. Alice Trumbull Mason, her grandmother, was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group. Cecily holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and completed a two-year printmaking course at the Calcografia Nazionale in Rome. She has taught at Saint Mary’s College and at Kent State University. She has been instrumental in forming the non profit Painting Center, and serves as Chair of its Advisory Board.
Her work has been widely exhibited, most recently at the Jill Newhouse gallery in New York City. Museum exhibitions include The New Brittain Museum of American Art, the Brattleboro Museum, and the National Academy Museum in New York. Reviews of her work have appeared in the New York Times, the Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, and the Huffington Post. Cecily has been a member of the American Abstract Artists group since 1997.
“As a native New Yorker, my paintings have always reflected the angularity of the city. I spent years making paintings of buildings, roof tops, and finally maps of the city. I began to play with the map image, layering one on top of the other thus creating new forms. Eventually, these map paintings shed their representational base and became more internal, psychological maps. I try to embrace opposing forces and create balance. I like working with the diversity that paint as a material provides: thin and thick, hard edge and ephemeral veils, and drips in all directions. Paint surfaces are explored by using various mediums to thin the paint or thicken it to impasto. Color and form are used in both organic process and consciously formal decisions, to explore ideas of plasticity and formalism.
In my recent work I concentrate on the essential issues of abstraction: color line and form. Surprise and humor are also important to me. I've found inspiration in work from the post-cubist period, such as the American Abstract Artists Group of the 1930s and 40s. They were also interested in working with the essential elements of abstraction, and doing away with anything extraneous. The viewer of my work will sense this connection and come away with a feeling of history revisited with a twist.”
