"Until last year I thought my father, Samuel Kahn (1927-2007), had largely wasted his life. But as I tremblingly type this essay, I am headed to a Virginia museum displaying a roomful of his psychedelically colourful, unselfconscious, off-kilter, long-forgotten works of art that, it turns out, make people happy. The exhibition Samuel Kahn, Ph.D. + Friends opens on 29 January at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, in its Gordon Art Galleries."
"It features around 50 of Dad's wood-carvings, paintings and sketches. In intense hues-he had no art training and never learned to mix paint-amoebas drip over kaleidoscopic cats gamboling on housetops. Mermaids sprout weathervanes. Fish spin on pedestals. Trees resemble brain lobes. Dad's titles are just as enigmatic: Two Friends in Tow + Cloudburst (around 2003), Trials & Tributaries on the Rocky Road to Birdland (1997). He carefully labelled some elements-grey triangles are "Canyon-Like Hills", a snaking white streak flecked in black is"Sandy Debris Frozen River"-as he tried to impose order on a world made incomprehensible by his failing mental health."
Samuel Kahn (1927–2007) produced psychedelically colorful, untrained wood-carvings, paintings and sketches that combine playful surrealism with naive technique. Around 50 works are displayed at Old Dominion University's Gordon Art Galleries, featuring intense hues, amoeboid forms, kaleidoscopic cats, mermaids with weathervanes, spinning fish and trees resembling brain lobes. Kahn used enigmatic titles and annotated elements to impose order amid his declining mental health. Curators describe the work as radiant, prismatic and grounded in earthy, natural materials, and scholars have likened his output to Peter Max, Grandma Moses, Marc Chagall and the Cubists.
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