Philip Koch Paintings

My wife and I traveled to Connecticut the weekend before last to visit one of the galleries that carries my paintings, the Art Essex Gallery in Essex, and the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme to check out their impressive Arthur Heming painting and illustration exhibition.  We also drove over to see the just expanded Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven.  I had visited before and knew they had a real powerhouse collection (paintings by most of the great masters you can think of, which is impressive, but moreover they got good  ones. Really good ones). The museum has grown significantly in size and so now there's more to see than you can reasonably take in. We're going to have to schedule another visit sooner than later. Following are a few hightlights from Yale's Collection. Above is a wonderful small oil by Edward Vuillard (French 1868-1940), The Thread , from 1893. Vuillard is showing off his mastery of design here in a big way with the eleg...

Arthur Heming, In Canada's Fairyland,  oil (Collection of the Art Gallery of Hamilton) one of the paintings in the exhibiton Arthur Heming: Chonicler of the North through June 2, 2013 My wife Alice and I drove up from Baltimore late last week to Old Lyme,  CT. to the Florence Griswold Museum. We wanted to see their new exhibit on the Canadian artist Arthur Heming (1870-1940) organized by the Museum London in London, Ontario. Shortly after 1900 American landscape painting was shaken up as the new wave of Impressionist thinking reached out shores. Many of the first artists to make the change in their way of seeing were to spend time here in a boarding house run by Florence Griswold on the banks of Connecticut's Lieutenant River. The boarding house survived as the Florence Griswold Museum. As a painter keenly aware of my art predecessors, I've been wanting to pay a return visit to this amazing piece of American art history.  We were lucky to arrive on a beautiful if cold af...

I always paint standing up. It's Edward Hopper's fault. Hopper's talents came in many forms- one that few people remark on is his restless tendency to always be walking around searching out a better point of view. So often looking at one of his paintings one immediately thinks "Gee I wouldn't have though to look at it from that odd angle." Because he kept moving around, Hopper found the unusual point of view others would overlook. It let him tell us things more ordinary artists missed.  Take this lighthouse in the 1927 watercolor above,  Rocky Pedestal,  that's from the Carnegie  Museum in Pittsburgh. Instead of parking his Buick and setting up the easel in the parking lot Hopper kept searching. Carrying paints, brushes and an easel,  he  scampered down over some rather inhospitable sharp rocks and peers up from below. He's found a viewpoint where the rocks loom in importance, fully holding their own against the white houses and ...

Wanted to show you what I've been working on this week. Above is a new 9 x 12" oil on panel I did of the Pamet River up in Truro, MA on Cape Cod, about a half mile from Edward Hopper's old painting studio. I had done the vine charcoal below set up on the banks of the Pamet with my portable easel in 2010 on one of my 14 residencies in the Hopper studio. And as I often do I continued working on the drawing back in my studio as recently as last week. One of the reasons I paint from my drawings I've done out on location is it gives me one extra opportunity to distill down the dizzying complexity of the actual landscape. To stand outside with one's easel and look through experienced eyes at the landscape is to see too many possibilities. Even in the course of a few minutes the appearance of your source can change dramatically. And the longer you peer at the landscape you discover more and more contradictory statements you could make. If an experien...

After a four year on and off search I am delighted to report I finally found the vine charcoal drawing I did of Edward Hopper's  bedroom. It was done in his Truro, MA studio in Fall of 2006. To get this point of view my  portable easel had to be set up in the studio's kitchen.  My missing drawing had been lurking until this morning somewhere in my studio in Baltimore. It has been driving me slightly mad as I remember having really liked it but just couldn't put my hands on it (confession, alright, it was  just where I had left it, tucked in with some other early Hopper studio drawings behind a larger painting in my storage racks).  The drawing served as the basis of a couple of pastels and ultimately for this larger oil, Edward Hopper's Truro Studio Bedroom , oil on panel, 24 x 12", 2012. Hopper was no stranger to making drawings when he worked in this studio (there is a major exhibition in the offing at the Whitney Museum being orga...