DAVID HAHN

                                New American Impressionist

      In David Hahn's vision a tree is not just leaves and branches, but a pattern of colors.  He does not explore the reality of objects but sees in his subject another reality of color and form, creating an aura that redefines his subject.  This is the essence of Pennsylvania Impressionism, paintings that interpret the state's grand landscape in the fleeting, transitory moment of light glimmering on the surface.

     Hahn's work strives for an atmospheric harmony and symmetry that evolves from the landscape.  His compositions are achieved by a balancing of color, bringing contrasting hues into areas dominated by opposing colors, thus creating a mosaic unified by the patterns of light.  The reality of trees, brooks, and waterfalls lose themselves in a visual transcendent poetry.

     In his twenty years of painting, Hahn has studied other American Impressionists, Edward Redfield and his student George Sotter, in particular, giving his style roots in the French Impressionism of the 19th Century.  Many Americans, Redfield among them, studied under the French Impressionists and brought their school of thinking back to this country.  The Pennsylvania Impressionism that evolved from this trans-Atlantic school has many distinctive painters, each seeking to transfer the energy of a moment's vision onto canvas.