Marilyn Kahn

Business Name: Marilyn Z. Kahn

Email: marilynzkahn@gmail.com

Phone: (508) 545-0125

Art Medium: Painting, Collagraph

Creating art has always been important to me. I probably began drawing at the age of 3. My older brother who was 6 years old and I fought over whose turn it was to use the brown paper bags that groceries came in. This was our drawing paper at that time. We would cut them open and flatten them out and draw on them with pencils or crayon. Both sides were used. The family did not have money for drawing paper. Nothing got wasted.

 This childhood creative play was the beginning of my growth as an artist. As time went on, my teachers saw my talent and the desire to make art. At the end of the school year, some teachers gave me left over school drawing paper to continue the creative process during the summer.

 Anyone can truly understand why I decided to devote my life to creating art.  The urge to create has always been so great. Whenever I had to give up making art for an extended period of time, I felt something in my life was incomplete. When my right hand or arm was injured, I would work with my left. I still have a couple of my left handed paintings.

 The process of creation is something that comes from your inner being. You have to continually allow the exploration of thoughts you wish to express. Most of my work expresses the beauty and power of nature. I love to see how things grow.  There are complicated patterns in nature, and simple patterns as well. My love of gardening, vegetables and flowers, often lead me to my subject matter. Cabbages are really fascinating. You see the way the leaves curl. You see the subtle colors when you look closely at them. The veins carrying water throughout the plant make great patterns.

 The backs of flowers are sometimes as fascinating to me as the fronts. Not all of flower’s backs are interesting enough for me to feature them in a painting. However, sunflower backs are very intricate and quite beautiful by themselves. They seem to go every which way at a certain period of the plant’s growth, before seeds start to form. Van Gogh hinted at them in his famous painting of Sunflowers. To me they are so beautiful, I featured them in my painting “Sunflower Backs”. Once the seeds start to form these patterns totally flatten out.