Interior scenes by Daniel Kohn testify that everything is a worthy subject of artistic study – including the kitchen sink. Not to mention the kitchen shelves, the refrigerator, the colander and the whisk. Flat but vivid expanses of wall and floor contrast with rashes of homey, familiar clutter. Not the stuff of Better Homes and Gardens perhaps, but certainly the stuff of life.
As one of many visual artists who took part in World Views, a cultural program offering vacant office space in Tower One of the World Trade Center, Daniel Kohn painted several views of the New York landscape from his 91 st floor studio. Of course, on September 11, 2001 the landscape paintings that Kohn produced during his residency in 1998-99, which he says "embody the physical sensations of being up there in the Towers," took on a new significance.
Painting is a place. The tension between the painting's actual surface and its metaphoric space creates a conflagration out of which meaning is born - or at least the potential for meaning. That is the specific place of painting.
