Philip Koch Paintings

Reading Public Museum

2012-01-27T13:05:00.000-05:00

I literally stumbled into a fabulous show a couple weeks back. I was driving back from visiting the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, NY where I'll be having a show and giving an artists' talk at the end of March. Stopped in the Reading Public Museum (I love that name) in Pennsylvania and saw their big American Impressionism: The Lure of the Artists' Colony exhibition. Unfortunately between organizing the show at the Hopper House Art Center and writing an article on my traveling museum exhibition Unbroken Thread for Fine Art Connoisseur magazine (which I finally finished today!), I haven't had time until now to post about this amazing show at the Reading Museum. It is drop dead gorgeous. Drawn entirely from the Museum's Permanent Collection, it is simply one of the strongest painting shows I've ever seen. That's the good news. The bad news is it ends January 29th. Maybe if you drop everything...

Above is a knockout painting by the Boston Impressionist William Paxton (1869-1941), Girl with a Hand Mirror from 1915. This painting has a remarkable textural feel to it. The way the hair falls over the woman's torso is just perfect. I love the counter motion Paxton set up between the direction of the falling hair and the bold diagonal pattern on her dress. The sense of solid volumes bathed in varying light and set into motion is simply amazing. If the Museum suddenly loses its mind and de-accessions this painting, please everyone remember I have a birthday coming up.

Below is a Charles W. Hawthorne (American, 1872-1930) oil, A Study in White, circa 1900. Look at how Hawthorne plants the woman squarely between two "bookends" of the dark leafy stalk at the left and the sharp dark shadow peeking out from behind her dress as it slides off the right hand side. It's not a small painting, and when you see him convince us about those spots of sunlight on her dress (which would have moved every 10 minutes), you realize this is a very good painting.

Hawthorne's oil also was conveniently vertical so they could make it into a handsome banner and hang it outside the Museum entrance.

It just keeps getting better. Here's their oil by John Singer Sargent (American, well partly at least, 1856-1925), Man Reading (Nicola d'Inverno) from around 1904-1905. The range of whites and greys playing off the ochres and oranges in his forearm seems so beautifully chosen. And have you ever seen a book painted with more personality than this one? I love the slightly warmer whites Sargent sneaks into the books pages contrasting against the stark colder whites of the sheets.

As I said earlier I've just been writing an article for Fine Art Connoisseur on how artists from the past have influenced my own work as a contemporary painter. I began my journey into painting under the spell of Rothko and Frank Stella in the 1960's. And I learned a lot about color and proportion. But after a year or so I began to miss the sense of light and shadow one could find in the older painters. Like this masterful Sargent. I realized that the 19th century painters routinely celebrated something my flat acrylic abstractions couldn't touch. So began my long march to teach myself how to draw in the traditional sense and to figure out what realist painting was going to mean to me. Among the paintings I remember looking at in art books way back then was this particular Sargent. Then I forgot it was nearby in Reading, PA. Coming across it in the Museum was greeting an old friend indeed.

Below is an oil in the show, February's Sun, by Frederick John Mulhaupt (American 1871- 1938). Like the Sargent of the man reading, Mulhaupt uses a dramatic light flowing into the painting, though this time from the right. It casts long "roller coasters"of shadow across the little hillocks of snow. You just know he was enjoying himself when he painted that passage of the picture.

Two other things work beautifully in this snow scene. See how carefully Mulhaupt sculpts his snow covered shoreline to press the dark water into an hourglass shape. I'd be willing to bet good money he exaggerated how far the fingers of the land extended out into the water to make a more stated visual surprise. The abstract beauty in a work like this can't be overstated. It's easy to miss as the artist makes it look so natural. But underneath, it's there, creating the visual energy that draws the viewer into the artist's vision.

Also notice the subtle shadowing Muhaupt sneaks in over the foreground land mass at the left. That too probably wasn't like that in nature. The painter knows he is trying to convince you this is a painting with a real, measurable depth to it. He has to make the front space feel different than what's on the other side of the stream.

Here's a view of one of the several galleries Reading Public Museum devoted to the show. I feel bad that I couldn't do my part in publicizing their American Impressionism show sooner as I know many of you who read this blog would love it. They did a really fine job.

Hairdressing and Other Lessons at the Delaware Art Museum

2012-01-20T13:00:00.005-05:00

Last week my wife took a day off from work at the mental hospital (literally) and we drove up to Wilmington, DE to visit an old friend, the Delaware Art Museum. We had lunch with Saralyn Rosenfield who's the Museum's Studio and Family Programs Manager and who was a former student at my art school, MICA down in Baltmore. She was delightful to talk with and persuaded me to bequeath my untold millions to the DAM just as soon as my ship comes in.

DAM's got an amazing collection that has held my interest for years. Above is a Charles Burchfield watercolor Wildflowers and Coke Oven Smoke painted in 1917 and then reworked some years later.

Look at the foreground where Burchfield goes a little wild with repeating the arcing rhythms in the jumble of plants. It could have looked repetitious in a lesser artist's hands, but Burchfield saves the day by contrasting warm gold highlights in his flowers against cool subtle green highlights in the tall plants at the right. So often is comes down to this, that what you paint is important, but even more it's how you paint it that makes all the difference.

My guess is that Burchfield was never happy with whatever it was that used to be in the middle distance at the right hand side of his painting. Probably if he was like me he mused and fussed about it for years and then finally went back into the piece. The coke oven smoke he employs to hide whatever it was that bothered him seems to intrude on the scene a little. While it's not seamless, my bet is the new element probably raised the level of the piece up a whole lot. We'll never know, but whatever the truth, I love the way his enchanted foreground now dominates his painting. You can stay Charles.

Here's a very unusual oil by Paul Cadmus (American, 1904 - and I had no idea he died so recently, 1999), Fidelma painted in 1937.

So often I find work painted in the 1930's and '40's had a special feel for light and elegantly sculpted volumes. This is a painting of the artist's sister and has to have one of the most inventive arrangements of arms and hands I've ever seen. Try an experiment- cover over the arm and hand that drapes over the dark hair and see how quickly the painting falls apart. My eye was first attracted to the network of dark walnut colored curls at the bottom of the canvas. But what's so good about Cadmus is that he invented an arrangement that plays the splash of hair off against her outstretched light arm. The two forms contrast each other so perfectly. That's the painter's task, to find the combinations that reveal to us viewers something we wouldn't normally see.

Of course I had to stop and pay my respects to DAM's famous Edward Hopper painting (longtime readers of this blog are saying to themselves about now "I knew this was coming..."). I've written about this painting, Summertime, before and focused on the remarkable abstract qualities of the cast shadows from the woman and the pillar at the right side of the building.

This time my eye went to the bottom of the painting where Hopper experiments with creating radically different kinds of surfaces. Naturally I looked through the fabric of the woman's dress at the hints of pink of her left thigh. Look at the wonderful choice Hopper makes for the color of the shadowed right calf played off against the dark cool grey of the shadow on the steps. The legs themselves are studied long and hard to extract just the most expressive subtly curving silhouette possible to contrast the straight hard lines of the stone staircase.

It's not so much that Hopper put in lots of detail- he doesn't. But he does concentrate on telling us something about areas of the painting we wouldn't at first think important. He goes that extra mile. It separates good painters from ordinary artists.

DAM also has some amazing 19th century work including a huge collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, tons of John Sloan's work, and one of the best collections of American illustration anywhere. And they have a very pretty restaurant where you can rest your feet. If you're imprisoned on the ever-so-dreadful Interstate Route 95 know that the Museum is a quick 5 minute hop off the highway.

"Three Things You Didn't Know About Edward Hopper"

2012-01-17T18:33:00.004-05:00

I'm having a small show that's different than what I usually exhibit. The Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, NY invited me to hang a selection of oil paintings I've done during my thirteen residencies over the years at "the other Edward Hopper House," the studio he designed and had built in S. Truro, MA on Cape Cod.

If you know me as a painter you realize this is an invitation to me to start fiddling around with some older paintings. It's funny to some people that I'd start painting again on an oil that's been around for a few years. But my batting average doing this is good, so I can't help myself.

Above is just such a painting, Morning, Truro Studio, oil on panel, 14 x 21", 1995, except that it's now 1995-2012. Looking closely at the piece as I was deciding what to include in the upcoming exhibit it just felt like it needed to have its tonal contrasted pushed a little harder. So I gave it a little push it got stronger.

The painting itself was done standing in Hopper's painting room looking through the door at the right to Cape Cod Bay and through the left door into the bedroom he shard with his wife Jo. This is the corner of his studio that inspired his famous oil, Rooms by the Sea, now in Yale's art museum.

I'm going to be giving an artist's talk at the Hopper House Art Center on March 31 titled Three Things You Didn't Know About Edward Hopper. I'm been studying Hopper so long my real challenge is going to be limiting myself to just three things, but perhaps talking about how Hopper came to make this painting should be on my short list.

Below is another view of the inside of Hopper's studio, this one a 24 x 12" oil on panel, Edward Hopper's Bedroom, Truro Studio, 2012, that I painted back in my Baltimore studio working from an on location pastel drawing. It's the view looking into his bedroom again, but this time from his kitchen. What grabbed my attention originally and got me thinking about making a pastel and an oil of this was the rhythm of the closet doors. They have the original stamped tin doorknobs that even in life strike one as just a touch over sized.

The Hopper studio is built up high on a sand dune, and in Hopper's day there were no trees or bushes offering to shade the house from the bright Cape Cod sun (think of all that white sand). Hopper put in just as many windows as he could possibly fit. As a result the house is unusually light filled from before dawn until after sunset.

On the painting above the other big attraction to my eye was the intense light shining across the floor from the painting room at the right. I think for any painter to make art they have to be seized by something they see. It has to be something that feels beyond the ordinary sensation. Years ago I studied painting at the Art Students League of New York with a wonderful teacher, the abstract painter Rudolf Barank. He used to urge me to find a great idea and then to say it in a radical way. That was one of his favorite words. Well, Hopper in designing his studio building was radically interested in how light would sweep across it and through it. It's a stunning place.

Here's Hopper himself in a photo taken late in his life (Hopper died in 1967) up in Truro. Hopper's sitting on a wooden love seat that's still there in the studio. This is the view looking due south and showing the 10' tall north window that illuminated the painting room. Hopper himself doesn't look exactly all warm and fuzzy in this photo. By almost all accounts, he wasn't. Yet this is perhaps the most respected American realist painter of the 20th century. To me this is a real mystery. What was it in his paintings that keeps so many eyes returning to see his work again and again?

I have my own explanation of the "Hopper phenomenon" or at least a theory-in-progress. Probably that's something I'll touch on in that upcoming artist's talk.

Here's the exhibit details:
Inside Edward Hopper's Truro Studio: Paintings by Philip Koch
Edward Hopper House Art Center
March 31 - May 13, 2012
opening reception, Saturday, March 31, 5 - 7 p.m., artist's talk 7 p.m.

Memorial Art Gallery Purchases Two Koch Drawings

2012-01-12T12:51:00.007-05:00

The art museum in Rochester, NY, the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG), just purchased two of my vine charcoal drawings for its Permanent Collection. This brings full circle my years as an artist. In the fourth grade I was taken on a school trip to MAG. It was the first museum I had visited. And though I didn't know it at the time, it had a profound impact on me.

Above is my drawing Monhegan Dawn, 7 x 14", 2006, one of the new acquisitions. It was drawn from life on Monhegan Island in Maine early, as the title suggests, one morning. The view is of Manana Island, essentially one huge dome shaped rock that shelters the tiny Monhegan harbor from the open sea.

I grew up just outside Rochester on the shore of Lake Ontario. One of my favorite things to do was studying the Lake. While it was often very rough, I loved the times were when the lake calmed and the breezes blew out from the shore over the water. It's surface would take on the look of a shifting abstract painting. My parent's told me these ever moving areas of ruffled up water were called cat's paws. I remember thinking that an odd name at the time. Years later though, after dedicated study of the feline species, I can see the connection with the unpredictable and capricious way cats can move. In drawing Monhegan Dawn I was seeing part of my childhood in those cold Maine waters.

Below is the other piece, Shore II, 8 x 12", drawn on a bridge over Otter Cove on Mount Desert Island in Maine. It's a piece that looks strikingly the way that beach where I grew up did back in the 1950's.

It was September, late enough in the year for the sun to cast long shadows over some of the rocky fingers of land. I happened upon the place just when the entire foreground was dimmed by shadow. But within minutes the light shifted to spotlight the stand of two pines. Their irregular silhouette added some needed syncopation to the landscape Within an hour's time the sun had moved again so much that every tree was equally lighted, making for a jumble of visual overload.

I don't use a camera to make my paintings, ironic as both sides of my family were Eastman Kodak people. But I find it's the slowness of drawing or painting from life that brings with it a special advantage- you stand there working at your easel longer. It you work long enough, you're more likely to discover some critical aspect of the idea that otherwise might have been overlooked.

The great Hudson River School painter Frederic Church did a famous oil from the same spot back in the mid 19th century, Otter Creek. He of course had turned his back on the view I'd chosen and instead

concentrated on the mountains behind me. I get a kick out of following those old painters around.

Remember that fourth grade school trip to the MAG? I do only partially. One thing was that the docent who took us through the old master galleries had been given marching orders to stop and talk about only paintings where everyone had kept their clothes on. My friends and I quickly discerned this pattern as we gingerly were led past any painting with exposed body parts. And as you can imagine we giggled through the tour with all the sophistication typical of 9 year old boys. Looking back, I bet some parent had called to complain to the Museum after their child on a similar school tour had been encouraged to look at a nude. What's a beleaguered Museum educator to do?

But one other thing stands out in my memory- actually the only painting I remember from the tour. It's Winslow Homer's My Studio in an Afternoon Fog and is one of Homer's real jewels. What attracted me

as a kid was that unlike the figures in the Renaissance paintings with their odd costumes, this painting looked like it came directly from my own experience. Why it conveyed such a powerful mood I couldn't put in to words back then. I was unconsciously sensing how a master like Homer could marshal color and light to expressive heights.

Look at the color of his sky- warmed up with raw umber and hints of yellow, and then cast your eye down to the cold colors he's chosen for the water. If anything, he seems to be putting a spotlight more on whitecapped waves than on the obscured sun. It's his way of surprising us viewers.

Another touch that's just marvelous is the warm almost black wall of rock that he runs diagonally across the front of the painting. It's made way more emphatic than the diminutive buildings. Yet it feels just right. It's as if Homer is placing a barrier between us and his studio, keeping it more of a dream than something we can reach out and touch. It's one powerful painting, and though I didn't know it at the time, it was prodding my imagination to start moving in a whole new direction. Thanks Winslow.

Edward Hopper House in the Moonlight

2012-01-09T13:04:00.001-05:00

Saturday evening I was up in Nyack, NY at the Edward Hopper House Art Center attending a talk by the set designer James Youmans. He was a great presenter. His talk got me thinking that both set designers and landscape painters have the same job- to lend a sense of personality to an empty space. I think in the back of the mind of any realist painter is a sort of imagined theater stage waiting to be populated with buildings, forests, mountain ranges, you name it. I know I think that way.

Leaving the Art Center, which was the birthplace and boyhood home of Hopper, I walked to my car parked on the side street and slid behind the wheel. This is the view that confronted me through my windshield. The nearly full moon had just risen and was brightly reflecting in the second floor window of Hopper's house. Hopper must have seen just this scene dozens of times growing up. Certainly he drank it in deeply, as the feeling of it kept coming back in so many of the oils he was to paint in subsequent years.

I've spent lots of time up on Cape Cod, sometimes staying and working in Hopper's Cape Cod studio in South Truro, other times in nearby Wellfleet or Provincetown. Looking at the Hopper place in Nyack Saturday night I couldn't help but be reminded of Hopper's painting of an inn in Provincetown, Rooms for Tourists. The house is still there on Bradford Street, looking every bit as it did in Hopper's oil.

It's a painting that celebrates the color of light, cooler highlights on the outside of the building and warmer light inside. Look at how Hopper sneaks into the composition the play between the orderly windows on the illuminated front of the house and the irregular geometry of the lights in its shadowed left side. Hopper is saying to us "look at how surprising even the most ordinary of scenes really is." That is art doing its job of waking us up and showing us that living is extraordinary, despite our tendency to allow our senses to cloud over and our feelings to dull.

Of course the other Hopper that comes to mind is his oil Summer Evening. Surely he based it in large part on his Nyack porch. There's a feeling of awkwardness to the scene- the young woman's rigidly straightened out pose compared to the man's more relaxed and asymmetrical positioning. I always imagined them to be a romantic couple where things might not be working out so well (please tell me I'm not the only one writing that script for these two).

Hopper has far fewer forms to work with in this composition than in the preceding oil. So instead he maximizes the expressiveness of the clapboard siding on the front wall of the house, taking great pains to gradate the color and tone of the light as it falls from the overhead porch lamp. There's a real glare to the lighting that adds a certain unease to the mood of the figures.

Just for a contrasting view of relationships, look at this wood engraving by Hopper's classmate at the New York School of Art, Rockwell Kent. Like Hopper's couple, the two figures are bathed in a sharp light from the above left. And they pose against an inky blackness. But there the similarity ends, as Kent prefers to strike a more gentle, sensuous, and far more optimistic note.

Let It Snow!

2012-01-05T22:04:00.004-05:00

I sometimes wonder if I'd have become a landscape painter had it not been for winter. When I was a kid growing up along the shore of Lake Ontario just outside of Rochester, NY, we used to get tons of snow. I know as one of my jobs was shoveling our long driveway. Maybe we always dream about our childhoods. I sure do, and often the dreams revolve around my old home in deep winter.

There's often the complaint that winter isn't as colorful as summertime. For the life of me I don't know what people are talking about when they say that, as I've always felt just the opposite. Snow blanketing the landscape turns all these amazing shades of blue, violet, cream yellow, absolute stark white, and a zillion shades of grey. And there is ALWAYS super high contrast of darks and lights.

Above is a Rockwell Kent that's new to me, with what strikes me as an odd combination of a more naturalistic foreground and a sky much more invented and surreal. In fact I almost wonder if it's a painting Kent went back into at a much later time in his career and never quite resolved. But I still love it.

Look at the way he uses the snow- sometimes covering large swatches of the landscape with solid white Other times like in the trees at the left peppering the dark pines with a pattern of snow "dots." Or leaving the snow out altogether like in the row of pines at the right. With snow you have incredible flexibility like that- it allows a playfulness with the form that's unmatched in other sorts of realist painting. It makes me feel more like an abstract painter.

Color-wise, check out the difference between the color of his highlights in the immediate foreground compared to those on the distant headland. Kent knew that as he changed the space, he had to change the color too to build up that feeling of depth.

One of the spiritual ancestors of Rockwell Kent has to be the spookily wonderful 19th century German painter Caspar David Friedrich. Below is the first image I ever saw of a Friedrich painting on my first day in Art History 101 at Oberlin College in Ohio. I flipped out over it.

These days I do most of my work in oil back in the studio based either on plein air vine charcoal drawings, or as below, working from drawings I make directly from my imagination. Here's a 7 x 14" vine charcoal drawing I did as a guide for an oil I'm working up in the studio right now.

And here's one I did just over the last two days that I'm planning to work from in oil. If I hadn't had 35 years of working directly from nature outside I wouldn't be able to make paintings from such simplified drawings. Those years of more perceptual work stuffed a lot of tools into my pocket that I can pull out when needed. For me, a painting is really a child born from drawing. Oil paint's incredible flexibility of course lets you do things with layering and color adjustment I don't think it's possible to do in a drawing medium. But that same ease of flexibility can get you into trouble and lead to mushiness and indistinctness in a canvas. Refocusing on drawing a few key expressive silhouettes is sort of the backbone that holds all the colors and soft, floating edges of oil pigment together. Here's a final Rockwell Kent for you. Look at how masterful his shapes are in the middle distance. And enjoy his wide ranging choices for the colors snow can be.

Winslow Homer's Painting Class

2012-01-01T18:29:00.007-05:00

Here's a watercolor by Winslow Homer (Homosassa River, 1904 from the Brooklyn Museum) that caught my eye the other day. Realize it's done with an extremely restricted palette (except for a tiny red jacket on one of the fishermen, it's got hardly any intense color in it). Homer's bringing this one home with his remarkable ability to improvise and to "lie" about what he was looking at. How did he learn how to do this so well?

It got me to wondering what sort of painting class Winslow Homer would run if he were to come back to life and hire a model.

Here is part of my figure painting workshop Dec. 10 at the Saginaw Art Museum. Kara Harris Brown, the Museum's Curator of Education did a great job of organizing the event (including bringing lots of donuts). I think everyone enjoyed themselves. I know I did.

Watching my students work, it struck me the more accomplished painters had learned not just about color and composition. but also how to have a good time. Beginning painters seemed hell bent on concentrating on the model. Of course one wants to master the figure, but it's possible to overdo anything. The more experienced of course had better drawing skills and a certain confidence that allowed them to relax more. Most important, they were quicker to notice things others might miss and see if they might make something surprising but convincingly expressive out of them. For example, the unexpected shape of the space between the model's legs and finding a way to make that one of the key features of the painting.

Looking at a detail of the Winslow Homer watercolor, you see how he "plays" with the background, making it dark at the far left, but leaving it only a light middle tone on the right hand half of the painting.

He did this I believe to allow those early wild looking strokes for the straight and curved tree trunks to keep from being lost in the darks. Probably in real life, the far distance was much darker, but Homer is willing to make big changes if he senses it will leave him a more intriguing composition.

Here's my favorite part of the picture, the fan-shaped holes in the palm fronds. Don't they look like eyes!

Their empty centers are left as the key accents in the top half of the painting. Look at how in comparison he tones down the branches and lightens up much of the main trunks to lighter greys. To me it seems Homer is saying to himself "let's see what I can do with this row of trees." He's not imprisoned with the mindset that he has to report to us every fact faithfully. Look back up to the entire painting at the top of the post- see how much Homer left out. This is the nuts and bolts of him being creative for us viewers.

Charles Burchfield, the American 20th century painter, and one of our supreme watercolorists, must have looked at Homer a lot. In the Burchfield below notice the same decorative repeated patterns in the foliage. Both of these artists are playfully seeing what they can do with the material presented them by their subject. Both of them know painting is at least as much about how they paint something as what it is they choose to paint.

In Winslow Homer's imaginary painting class I'm sure he'd be a serious stickler for making his students become superbly good at drawing what they see. Imagine all sorts of stern 19th century style pedagogical excess. But he wouldn't stop there. He'd also insist his students be playful, that they imagine how things in their source might be moved around, have their color changed, or perhaps be eliminated altogether. He'd demand of his students that they go beyond mere reporting of facts to exaggerate their favorite ideas, pushing their ideas beyond what one would normally expect. He'd insist on his students finding delight in what their eyes could show them.

Would we want anything less from his students? I wonder where I can sign up for his class.

The Hand of the Past on the Art of Today

2011-12-29T11:53:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I'm asked if I only like art from the past. Far from it. But there is a reason I so often write about work done some time ago. It's often one of the best places to pan for gold.If you go to art museums or art galleries a lot, you are guaranteed to run into some work that leaves you cold. For professional artists, the problem gets worse, and you're likely to feel driven up the wall by some things you see. Being committed to making paintings and staying at one's easel for years brings with it a deeply emotional investment. It's an occupational hazard for artists. I was at a major American art museum yesterday and saw work that made my heart leap, and things that offered me very little. Generally I think it's more productive to spend my energies talking about work I find exciting rather than running down art I think is unsuccessful, especially when those artists aren't around to defend themselves.

One of the artists I love to talk about is George Inness (American 1825 - 1894). Above is Saginaw Art Museum's George Inness oil Golden Glow, 1880 that the Museum hung alongside my own work in their Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch show (through Feb.19, 2012). Inness is a fascinating guy, someone who provides a sort of bridge between the earlier American Hudson River School painters and the more impressionist inspired works that came into favor towards the end of the 1800's.

In this painting we see the darks of the foreground foliage being pushed together to form what looks like a strong abstract painting (think of a good Robert Motherwell). Inness is working to form the most intriguing silhouette possible for his darks.There's even one place where he carves out what looks like a key hole in his foliage to let the sky shine through.

Looking at painters like Inness taught me to search out ways to make my shapes expressive . Here's a photo from the Saginaw Art Museum's show of my oil From Day to Night, 36 x 72". You can see how my two dark islands have been consciously maneuvered to squeeze the narrow channel of light water between them. It's pushed into a abstracted "S"shape. To make the viewer care about the world you are painting for them you have to install intriguing form into even the empty areas. In fact, it is how you handle the empty areas to my mind that makes or breaks a painting.

Here's another of the works from the Museum's Permanent Collection in the show, Landscape at Sunset by Felix Russman (American, 1888- 1962). Russman shows that same imperative to insert extra form into his painting with how he places his handful of trees. See how he pushes them together into essentially two "teams". The trees enclose an area of sky on the horizon that looks an awful lot like the silhouette of the triangular roof of the solitary building. Russman is saying, through how he arranges his shapes, that the human presence (building a roof) is just part of the overall scheme of nature. It's an optimistic view of us living in harmony with the natural world. It's a real beauty of a painting too.

In the same gallery space with the Russman oil is my painting Under the Moon. Like Russman, I'm choosing shapes to express the feeling I intend for the painting. If you look closely you'll see how I've reversed the actual direction of the edges of the yellow house so it gets wider as you look up towards the roof. What I wanted was the feeling of the house as an almost living thing, straining to rise up closer to the unseen bright moon. Playing with the usual rules of perspective like this can give an inanimate object like a house the sense that it is subtly gesturing.

William P.Ritschell (American, 1844-1949, one long-lived artist!) painted the oil below, also from Saginaw's Permanent Collection and now hanging in their Unbroken Thread show. Ritschell is using one of the time honored "tricks of the trade" for painters with color. He makes a surprisingly green sky look believable by carefully gradating its tones from lighter to darker. Imagine a black and white photograph of this painting. Sure, we'd miss the delicate color, but the sky would still feel spacious and convincing. Then, compared to the cool greens of the sky, look at how warm the overall hue of the land and trees appears. He organizes his colors.

Here below is my oil Ascension in the show. As in the Ritschell, ignore the colors and notice how the sky is heavily gradated from light to darker greys. Even more so for the ground plane that's intersected by all those waterways. Gradation is a huge key to evoking feelings of movement, light, space, and atmosphere. It only makes sense for us contemporary painters to study how the old time painters like Ritschell, Russman and Inness used gradation. We don't have to use it just the same way. In fact we shouldn't in my opinion. But it's foolish to assume these old painters have nothing to teach those of us painting now.

In the beginning of this blog post I said I usually try not to publicly criticize other painters whose work I feel falls short. Very often what I'm missing in their work is the remarkable visual richness I find in the best of the art from the past. It's not that the art of the19th century was better. It wasn't. There are tons of awful landscape paintings done 150 years ago mouldering away in basements and attics all over the land.

Over time, work that should be forgotten usually is. But if people are still paying attention to a painting done generations ago, it is probably because the forms and colors in it are doing something remarkable.

One thing that helps me enormously in my own pursuit that necessary visual richness is to do lots of paintings on a small scale. The best of them become guides for me in making larger and more ambitious oils. Here's a little "room" of small oils grouped together in the Saginaw Museum show. That's a final lesson I've gleaned from looking at the art of the past. The best of those painters, like Inness, did tons of very modest sized paintings. They were believers in keeping their numbers up as a tool to lead them to seeing on a higher level. The best of their small paintings and drawings were used as studies for their major works. It's one heck of a good idea for us painting today.

Is Art Original? Saginaw Art Museum Part Three

2011-12-25T11:13:00.005-05:00

Here's another view of the current Saginaw Art Museum exhibit, Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch (through Feb. 19, 2012). At the right is my oil Equinox, a work that I felt looked especially good in this venue for the show. In this photo you can see how all the tones in Equinox were held down into middle tones and darks except for the flying white bird at the left and one snow covered island in the distance. I think that's where the bird is headed. It's critical to figure out which of your ideas in a painting are going to be the ones that command the viewer's attention. Spotlighting just two key forms as I did here is one time-tested way to accomplish this.

In the distance at the left is Otter Cove that I discussed in the previous blog post. In that painting I've put the emphasis on the big dark hillside at the left side and brightly backlit it with a glowing light on the left horizon.

Ryan Kaltenbach, SAM's Curator and Deputy Director hung a dozen works from 19th and 20th century landscape painters alongside my own paintings in Unbroken Thread to provide some historical background. Here's one by an old friend, the 19th century American painter Jasper Cropsey, A Summer Afternoon from 1853.

I say old friend because a similar Cropsey oil was one of my first serious introductions to landscape painting when I entered Indiana University's MFA program in 1972. The IU Art Museum had a Cropsey that I used to study over and over again. It fascinated me how the artist had divided up his painting's space into overlapping planes.I knew I had to learn how he did it so well. They marched from the foreground all the way back to the sky, each one having its own distinctive color and tone, yet all hanging together wrapped up in a warm summer atmosphere.

When I was in undergraduate school at Oberlin, nobody had ever mentioned pictorial space. To me figuring out how to build a convincing space was a huge discovery. I learned from Cropsey some of the moves I use to this day in my paintings.

Also included in the exhibition are these two Charles Demuth (American, 1883- 1935) watercolors. Totally different than the Cropsey, these two are much more about moving the viewer's eye across the surface of the painting. Cropsey did that too but his main focus was to plunge the viewer into the picture's distance. In Cropsey I feel myself thinking about close and far, in Demuth it's much more about up, down, left, right.

Yet each has some of the other, flat design and depth. One of the all but impossible tricks a painter has to master is to see reality as a flat design of shapes and colors, AND as a world of volumes and depth of space, at the same time. How do we do it? Honestly I don't know other than to say it's accomplished only with great effort. Certainly I would say to any aspiring artist, or to any art lover, that they should practice trying to see in both ways. The more one concentrates and practices using one's eyes, the easier it becomes.

Here are the two Demuth's in the show with my oil Ascension in the distance.

Here are two more of the accompanying paintings Ryan Kaltenbach added to the show. They're by Charles Warren Eaton (American 1857 - 1937) and were both painted in 1905. They show a real influence of George Inness I feel. Both show that dual aspect of two dimensional design on the surface and a desire to pull the viewer's eye way back into the shimmering far distance. I think they're really nice paintings and I'm honored to show my work with them.

Following up from those two dark Eaton oils, here's a view from the central part of SAM's big gallery showing from left to right my North Passage, 45 x 60", Ascension, 40 x 32" and Down to the Bay, 36 x 72". Especially with the two on the left you can see me borrowing the dark foreground idea that Eaton used so effectively in the paintings I talked about above.

I've always been lucky as a painter because so many of the artists of the past seemed to offer me help in telling my own story. When I first started painting everyone around me seemed obsessed with being "original"and was struggling to come up with a "new idea" that they could paint. I too fell into that way of thinking.

But early on my feelings started to change, especially under the influence of seeing Edward Hopper's work. It struck me as misguided to think that we living now were somehow especially privileged, that we had been blessed with a superior understanding compared to those who have gone before us. People a hundred years ago thought and felt as deeply as we do today. I'm convinced of this by the amazing expressiveness of the art they left behind for us.

But it is not up to us to repeat the past. We can't. And if we try we always fail. Reality is always bigger than we are. We comprehend it only partially. I believe the world looks and feels a little different to us than it did to our predecessors. If you look at paintings from the 1930's there is an unmistakable feeling for volumes and movement that is just different than how anyone paints today. My take on it is that unconsciously we all today process things a little differently than before. Because of this the job of contemporary artists is to come up with new combinations of light, forms, and colors to give expression to how we feel today.

Cropsey and Eaton and Demuth painted how the world felt to them in their time. To us their work feels both engaging and just a touch foreign. My paintings feel they are made in this time, our time. A hundred years from now, landscape painters will have changed again. It all makes for a long and fascinating road.

Yes, I wish I could look forward and see what's coming around the bend. But I can look back down that long remarkable chain of landscape paintings- Demuth and Hopper, Inness, Thomas Cole, Constable, Ruisdael and Rembrandt, and so on. It's wonderful to be part of something bigger than yourself. All us painters can only hope we fill our place on that road as honorably, and as artfully as we can.

Saginaw Art Museum Part Two, Kensett and Snow

2011-12-22T12:32:00.005-05:00

Here's the entrance to Saginaw Art Museum's current exhibit of my paintings. Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch (through Feb. 19, 2012). The photo is taken from the beautiful glass enclosed walkway that leads from the Museum's original 19th century Mansion house to one of its new wings.

Below I've turned around and photographed the doorway to the walkway currently full of handsome metal sculptures by David Holtslander.

At the right is my oil The Voyage of Memory, a piece inspired by the 19th century American painter Thomas Cole's series of four paintings, The Voyage of Life (I had the pleasure of seeing them again just last weekend down at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.). At the left is my oil Otter Cove, which I'll return to later.

Below is me posing with an oil by another of my early favorite artists, the American John F. Kensett. It's Study for the Lakes of Killarny, that Kensett painted in 1856 while on a trip to Ireland. The Museum hung about a dozen landscapes by 19th and 20th century painters alongside my own work to provide some historical context. The show, after all, is called the Unbroken Thread.

Here's a better view of their Kensett. He was a huge influence on me when I was taking my first tentative steps into landscape painting in the Fall of 1970. Indiana University Art Museum had a wonderful Kensett. It was a coastal scene that reminded me of the rocky beach where I grew up on the shore of Lake Ontario, just outside Rochester, NY. In particular I loved the silvery greys he used on his prominent rocks. I did a copy of it from life right in the Museum, the first time I'd ever done that. Saginaw Art Museum's Kensett has a lot of that same feeling to the light.

Below on the left a photo my wife Alice took of me in the Fall of last year during our 13th residency at Edward Hopper's former painting studio on Cape Cod. At the right is my large oil Otter Cove.

Below is another view of the 50 painting exhibition with the same oil,Otter Cove, at the far right.
Saginaw's gallery space is huge.

Here's Otter Cove. It's 44 x 55" and was inspired by my many trips to Mt. Desert Island in Maine. Frederick Church, the 19th century American painter did one of his famous oils at the same spot on the Island, but his view turns to look at the mountains. I worked on this oil by looking at a vine charcoal drawing I did on the spot looking the other direction, out to sea. As the painting progressed I played around with the forms considerably until I was happy with the result. One of the changes I made was to cover the foreground with heavy snow.

Partly that's because I grew up up North, and snow was (and is) such a big ingredient in my imagination. But also in the back of my mind are some other painters who celebrated snow and winter. As the Winter Solstice is just past, I should show one of them. Here's Rockwell Kent's painting Afternoon at Sea, Monhegan, from 1907. I have several of the drawings I made of Monhegan Island in Maine in the exhibition.

Rockwell Kent of course wasn't the sissy I am. He moved to Monhegan Island in northern Maine and built three houses there (one of which was later purchased by Jamie Wyeth), worked as a lobster man, and painted some of the finest plein air winter paintings in American Art history.

Unbroken Thread Exhibition At Saginaw Art Museum

2011-12-19T10:53:00.003-05:00

This week I was grading portfolios at MICA after returning from the opening reception for Saginaw Art Museum's Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch exhibition in Michigan (through Feb. 19, 2012). These are intense face to face reviews with individual students. Maybe it was the fatigue from the long weekend of travel, but it struck me that I wished I could summarize all the things I've said to my students this year in just a few words. Of course the concepts behind good painting (and superior drawing) are anything but simple and need to be approached all kinds of ways. Lots of my lectures get long and pretty word heavy. I don't know how else to do it.

Sometimes you want to bend the stick the other way and boil it all down to its essence. So here it is as an early holiday present, the words I wished I'd told my classes this year-

Enjoy Your Eyes.

My eyes have brought me a huge share of the enjoyment I've felt in living my life, and a good portion of my understanding of the world as well. This show Michigan is big- fifty pieces- and it's a celebration of the pleasures I've taken. We had a great turn out for the opening reception and based on the comments I received and the inquiries about how to go about collecting my paintings, I'd say others were sharing in the visual pleasures too.

Above is what greets you as you enter the Museum's largest gallery. At the front is my painting The Song of All Days. The painting is a tribute to the thousands of eloquently beautiful days I've seen in my 40 years as a painter. It is a particularly dark painting, partly because I frequently find a resonance with the shadowed side of world.

I remember back to 1967 when I was taking my first studio art class at Oberlin College. The instructor said something about how it was good to "notice the shapes of shadows." Hearing those words set off a reaction like a light bulb in my head- I had never really considered that every shadow has a shape. To me they had been just areas where the light had dimmed. But the instructor had prodded my thinking to start opening a door wider. He opened a door I was ready to walk through.

Below is me (at the very far left giving a short Artist's Talk at the opening reception Dec. 9. In it I urged the visitors to look at the whole exhibition of course, but to decide which painting they thought was the best before they left. That's good advice for anyone visiting any exhibit. Maybe my paintings or my remarks might open another door someone else is ready to walk through.

Here is exterior of the Saginaw Art Museum. Fifteen years ago I had been invited to have a solo show of my landscapes when the Museum was just the mansion house at the left. In the intervening years two large additional wings have been built. My show filled up the modern wing on the right.

Ryan Kaltenbach, the Curator and Deputy Director of the Museum decided to add about a dozen landscapes by earlier painters from the Museum's Permanent Collection to the exhibit. Once I had moved beyond my earliest work of colorful painted abstractions, I always felt deeply indebted to the work of the realist painters who went before me. It seemed they offered so many tools that I could use to tell my own story. One of the 19th century paintings hung alongside my own work was this one by the French Barbizon School painter Harpignies (1819-1916). These were among the first painters to take their oils outside and work in paint directly from observation of nature. They always seem to have something of a pantheist spirit to them, with their tress expressing a remarkable living personality. In this case demonstrating a wonderful fluttering and ascending movement, exactly the kind of sensation you can have out in front of nature.

That sort of fascination with the natural world runs all through artists from the past that inspire me today. Here below is a wall of three of my birch tree pieces Saginaw Art Museum hung together as a group. They show me picking up on the same idea of the movements suggested by rising tree trunks. In the foreground at the left is my charcoal The Birches of Maine, center is the oil Deep Forest Pool, and at right the oil The Birches of Maine. These artists back from the Barbizon School helped me paint these pictures today.

Here are two more of my oils out of the exhibition hanging in the same section of the show with the old masters' landscapes. At left is Red Whisper, oil, 30 x40" and at right Under the Moon, oil, 24 x 36".

Both of these paintings have a frankly romantic feeling to them. To me nature often seems to express a slightly unexpected and mysterious side. I want my paintings to capture some of that.

That kind of romanticism from America's 19th century paintings have no better exponent than George Inness. Here's me posing (somewhat gleefully) with Saginaws' Inness painting Golden Glow from 1880.

Edward Hopper House Art Center, Grand Finale

2011-12-13T23:15:00.003-05:00

For those of you who've decided I'm off the charts nuts when it comes to Edward Hopper it probably wouldn't be a good idea to give you any additional evidence. But, despite years of therapy I've just have to share with you the last batch of photos I took of Hopper's boyhood home.

Please be understanding...

Above is my wife Alice standing outside the Edward Hopper House Art Center, one block from the historic Hudson River in downtown Nyack, New York. Check out the wild architecture of the blue turreted house next door. I imagine it excited young Edward's imagination as a boy, with him perhaps picturing it in his mind as a castle with knights and princesses. It sure would have pushed my fantasies that way.

Here's Alice and our daughter Louisa standing on Hopper's front porch right outside his front doorway.

The Art Center has lovingly preserved the feeling of the place, keeping just as much of the rooms and furnishings as they could as they were in Hopper's 18 years in the house. Below is my niece Jenny walking down the central hall with the open front door in back of her.

Here's Hopper's bedroom again, this time seen from the second floor hallway. Two of the three windows in his room are shown. The window at the left faces due East towards the Hudson River. I believe Hopper's life long love of strong early morning sunlight had its beginnings right here. The morning sun would have absolutely blasted into the room from these windows and awakened him daily. Perched up on the high second floor of the home, it was a safe lookout from which the reclusive future artist observed the world, starting a pattern he followed his entire life.

Turing the camera a bit to the right, here's me in front of the fireplace in Hopper's bedroom as seen from the second floor hallway.

Here's the wide, clunky floorboards in the room.

Here's one of the smaller rooms back downstairs. I'm standing next to one of the early easels Hopper painted on as he was just starting out.

One of his paintboxes full of his brushes and paints.

And here's the one bathroom Hopper had in the house with the original claw footed bathtub at the right. The toilet and sink look to me to have been put in probably after Hopper moved out. His sister Marion continued to live for the rest of her life in the house and died only a few years before Hopper.

The is the back of the house.

And this is the backyard, taken from the top of the steps in the above photo. That's Jenny and her husband John standing among the just fallen leaves. I wonder if young Hopper was given the job of raking the leaves up every fall in what is a very large yard.

Back in the house again, here's the largest room which must have been the Hopper's living room. The Art Center has turned it into a regular exhibition space for changing exhibits of local and national artists.

Another view of the main gallery with the front hall in back and the Art Center's bookstore and front desk in the far room.

This next view is taken in the main gallery looking to the adjoining smaller gallery.

Here's Jenny and Alice together in that back gallery.

I've always seen in Hopper a deep attachment to nature. To me there's a demonstrable romantic side to him that always comes out when he paints forests or hillsides. Less than a mile up the street is the state park containing the Palisades of the Hudson. These are really tall cliffs, I'm guessing off the top of my head they might be approaching 1000 in height. And they are steep. We went for a long hike along their base, with the cliffs looming over us on one side and the Hudson River lapping gently on the other. It was a fantastic setting.

Certainly young Hopper knew the cliffs well and must have been struck by them. I would have had imagined he would have wanted to paint them a lot ( I certainly would like to do a whole series of paintings from them), but that's putting my own direction in painting onto Hopper. He always insisted on choosing his own subjects and they tended toward far more modest and contained spaces. What he chose reveals much of his unique eye. Therein lies much of his greatness as a painter. If anyone ever followed his own drummer, it was this guy Hopper.

I'd strongly urge all Hopper lovers to visit Nyack and tour the Edward Hopper House Art Center and check out the area. You will love it. And you'll have a much deeper sense of what Hopper was all about.

Thanks for bearing with me, and I will now give Hopper a little rest on this blog, at least for a little while. Saginaw Art Museum out in Michigan just opened their feature exhibit Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch last weekend. I'll be showing pictures of the exhibit and talk about my time out at the

Museum. Here's a preview of the next blog post, a photo of the entrance to the show.

Edward Hopper House Art Center, Volume II

2011-12-01T12:45:00.005-05:00

To readers in the Mid-Atlantic area I want to announce my Sabbatical Exhibition at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore opens this morning (through Dec. 18, 2011 in MICA's Decker Gallery in the Fox Building, 1303 W. Mt Royal Ave., Baltimore, MD 21217). There are six oils on display, two of them of Edward Hopper's "other" home, his studio on Cape Cod, and the other four are recent medium to large panoramic landscapes. There will be a public reception Thursday, Dec. 8 from 5 - 7 p.m.

Above is Hopper's boyhood home. I write a lot about Hopper because he played such a pivotal role in my early art education. His long shadows and bright sunlight just pushed me off the cliff where I'd been standing and painting my acrylic color abstractions. It wasn't a soft landing that I made as I began to teach myself how to paint as a realist, but I knew the prod from Hopper had started me on my path home.

In the last post I was talking about my sense that much of what Hopper painted throughout his life was powerfully tinged with the memories he carried of his boyhood home in Nyack, New York. This white building is the Edward Hopper House Art Center as it looked late last Saturday afternoon. This is a view that Hopper knew well- very well. He was born in the bedroom that's behind the two second floor windows at the far left. That room served as his bedroom for the next 18 years.

Below is one of his watercolors of a house in Gloucester, MA, that looks an awful lot like the home he'd left behind. He painted many more like it.

There are many painters whose work I love, but probably none I've studied in as much depth as Hopper's. His paintings were for me like beloved lessons from an old teacher. I always tell me students that one of their jobs is to find "additional parents" from among the artists of the past. People who will teach them what it is they need to grow into the artists they're meant to become. I focus on Hopper so frequently because my past is so bound up with his paintings. The more I learn about Hopper the better I understand myself as a painter. So bear with me...

Here's a detail of the front of the Hopper house.

Not surprisingly big shuttered windows on white clapboard houses figured prominently in his work throughout his life, as in his oil Cape Cod Morning below.

Let's go back up to his bedroom on the second floor. I took this photo in the late afternoon when a touch of sunlight diagonally grazed the wall.

Looking at the photo I was reminded of his Sun in an Empty Room.

Here's another view looking out his bedroom window.

My wife Alice and niece Jenny doing something Hopper did thousands of times.

Another view of one of those bedroom windows.

There must be at least a dozen oils by Hopper of a woman staring out a similar window.

Summer Evening, another Hopper oil feels heavily indebted to Hopper's front porch.

Here's Alice and my daughter Lou talking on the porch last Saturday.

I myself used to paint lots of architecture. Usually my houses were similar to Hopper's oils of white houses. The funny thing is, unlike Hopper, I grew up in a sort of California modern style house with of all things a giant round living room (my dad wanted something out of the ordinary). After my dad died when I was 13 that home became a much less happy place, enough so to propel me to look to 19th century styles of houses when I began painting outdoors years later.

About 15 years ago that began to change. My eye was drawn away from painting buildings towards reveling in the all natural world. Traces of human presence began to feel like an intrusion on the more romantic imagery of an untouched land. The one exception to this has been the series of paintings I've been doing of the interior of Hopper's Cape Cod paintings studio in S. Truro, MA. I've been working on them on and off during my 13 residencies staying and painting there. This coming spring I'll be showing a small group of them at the Hopper House Art Center.

Edward Hopper House Art Center

2011-11-27T16:06:00.005-05:00

Had a mini-revelation yesterday. On a totally intuitive level I now "get" Edward Hopper. It happened as I was looking out the bedroom window where Hopper slept for his first 18 years. Hopper fell in love with that view and never recovered. It really is that simple.

Yesterday with my family I went to the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, NY, the birthplace and boyhood home of Hopper. It's right on the Hudson River just north of New York City. Slated for demolition by the city fathers to make way for a parking lot, a more far sighted group of citizens fought to preserve the home as a historic site. They won and in 1971, five years after the death of Hopper, the home opened as a nonprofit art center. They place is drippingly historic, lovingly preserved, and worthy of a visit from anyone seeking a deeper grasp of Hopper's art.

Recently Rachael Solomon, the Program Director at Hopper House, invited me to show a group of the paintings I've done during my residencies in the "other Hopper House", the studio Hopper lived in half of each year on Cape Cod from 1934 almost until he died in 196.7. They'll be on display in the Nyack Hopper House this Spring.

That's me above grinning ear-to-ear yesterday in Hopper's front yard. It's just a block from the Hudson River, that source for America's first indigenous painting movement, the Hudson River School that has been such a motor force in my own painting.

Below is the view looking out Hopper's front door to his porch where my wife Alice (left) chats with my daughter Louisa.

Turning around here's the view into the house from the front doorway with the main hallway opening up to the left to the living rooms now used as the main exhibition galleries for the Art Center. At the far right is the railing for the stairway leading up to Hopper's bedroom.

Here's Hopper's stairway viewed from the second floor.

I met and had a great talk with Arthur Gunther, a photographer and long time Trustee of Hopper House who was so kind as to open up Hopper's bedroom for me to see. It's normally used as a workroom by the staff, but they hope to restore it and open the bedroom to the public in the future. Art told be they still have Hopper's bed. The door still has the original lock on it and Art needed to do some serious fiddling with it to get its worn parts to open for us.

Below is one of the three windows inside the bedroom.

And walking up to the window here's what Hopper saw daily as he grew up, the view looking due East to the banks of the Hudson River.

That view really got me, especially the light dancing across scene. I too grew up in a house with a water view, in my case Lake Ontario just East of Rochester, NY. Living up to it's name as one of the Great Lakes, Ontario was vividly wide open and very wild much of the time. In contrast to Hopper's view of Nyack, a busy boat building town in his time, my view of the water was framed by steep hillsides, heavily covered with a mature beech tree forest. I think Hopper's life long attraction to sunlight shining on architecture and on water stems from just his experience of this view. That I looked daily instead at an all natural view of Lake Ontario is the biggest single reason I've focused my own painting on images of wilderness.

Artists all have "first impressions" of the world- the images that imprint really deeply in their minds. These are something they fall in love with for the rest of their lives. Look out Hopper's upstairs bedroom window and you have literally a window into his soulful world.

Here below is Alice and our niece Jenny (right) gazing out the bedroom's next window over to the right

yesterday.

One of the oils Hopper painted (years later) that immediately came to my mind as I looked out the his window was this stunning view of Gloucester Harbor (in MA). Like his boyhood view, it too makes us climb over a roof or two before we can see the water and the ships. That he could paint it so well testifies to how he could reach down into his memory and back in time to when the whole world looked fresh and amazing to his young child's eyes.

Here's another Hopper that looks like a scene he must have seen from the river's edge many times.

Early on Hopper did paintings of his home. Here's one the Whitney Museum has now painted right there in his bedroom in probably 1905 or '06. Note the doorway at the left.

Here's the same spot yesterday afternoon.

I will be posting some more photos and comments on the Hopper House in a few days. In concluding right now one last thought struck me yesterday. Hopper's home was lovely but it wasn't extraordinary. Quite modest in scale and with a water view that was great but not more remarkable than what one can see in almost any town. It was Hopper's eye and fertile imagination that extracted from his early years the thoughtful temperament he needed to produce those hundreds of paintings that are so widely loved today.

Any Hopper lover would have a ball coming to Nyack and visiting the terrific Hopper House Art Center. It's not fancy, just as Hopper wasn't, but it shares his straightforward poetry. Walking around the Nyack neighborhood you'll see building after building that will seem familiar to you from his paintings.

What Hopper is telling us is to open our eyes not to what is waiting for us in some exotic distant location but right now where we are. The magic is there, right in front of you concealed perhaps in what seems most commonplace. With the right eye, the right point of view and the right light, Hopper shows us the exceptional hidden right in our own neighborhoods.

News from an Angel

2011-11-22T22:39:00.004-05:00

Here's an angel announcing to Mary that even though she hasn't had sex she's going to have a baby who is the son of god. All things considered, she's taking it pretty well. Next time you have something to tell me could you please enlist an angel as your go-between? Especially one that looks as cool as this one. Usually I just get emails these days.

I don't usually look at Renaissance painting very much, but I ran across this Botticelli Annunciation this week. I love it and have been having the best time drinking it in.

Admittedly both the figures take somewhat unexpected poses- the angel kneeling and extending his upraised hand with his fingers splayed out. And Mary bending her knees so oddly to the right. Is she curtsying, swooning, or what? In the hands of a lesser painter these two figures would look ridiculous but here they seem self assured and absolutely right. The empty space right between their outstretched hands looks like they're feeling the surface some mysterious and invisible sphere with their fingertips.

Anyone who has ever tried to paint hands will immediately realize Botticelli sweated bullets to get the hands and arms just right. To him this was an important story and he was determined to nail it no matter how many times he had to draw and redraw his figures. His overarching commitment to making his painting the best it could be has set the bar high, very high, for us painters who have to follow him.

There's a lot of reasons for Botticelli's success. He makes each part of the painting have its own unique personality (for example the busy ruffled robes of the angel are consciously played off against the more restrained smooth garments wrapping around Mary). She seems elegantly sculptural. One of the most beautiful accomplishments of the painting is how Botticelli paces himself, alternating between energized and tightly patterned surfaces (the robes and the plants for example) and purposely empty surfaces (like the cool grey walls). Botticelli knows when to let your eyes rest.

A lot of what's great about this painting is the intrinsic expressiveness of how the artist painted his silhouettes and chose his colors. It's easier to see the abstraction of his composition with the image turned upside down. Looked at this way, it's easier to forget what you are looking at and focus instead on how those forms have been painted. As you begin to do that, you begin to enter the artist's mind.

Botticelli was probably deeply religious and telling this bible story was critically important to him on that level. But even today for viewers who might not share the artist's theology, there is a remarkable emotional and human depth to the painting. I believe it affects us so because as the artist worked he got in touch with those parts of his psyche where his most profound feelings resided. Through long efforts, clear eyes, and a remarkable openness to his own heart, Botticelli made something that speaks to us all these centuries later.

Many years ago I was given a fantastic lesson by one of my instructors about how artists like Botticelli composed their paintings, I can't remember which Renaissance painting it was, but my instructor took a reproduction like this one and, turning it upside down, started tracing with a ruler some of the hidden diagonal trajectories the painter had used to organize his composition.

As a beginning artist I had been used to looking at paintings the way most people do- by identifying the objects and the figures. As the instructor looked and drew, a doorway started to open for me on a whole other way of seeing. My teacher was revealing to me another world of relationships between forms. He was helping me to see the nearly invisible choreography a painter has to use to pull their many forms together. He showed me that the painter knew the dance steps necessary to make power happen in a painting.

I don't paint literal annunciations like Botticelli did. But studying (and most of all enjoying) paintings like this one taught me a mountainous amount of knowledge. Some of it I can put into words, which is why I do things like teach painting and write blog posts like this one. But there's another level to color and composition that's deeper and can only be reached by relying on one's best intuitions. And discovering art you love puts you in touch with those heightened intuitions.

Below is the design for the announcement card Saginaw Art Museum will be mailing out to publicize their show of my landscapes, Unbroken Thread. They reproduced my oil Ascension. It owes a lot to my looking at the highly structured paintings of the past master painters like Botticelli. Look at the network of streams intersecting the low valley and how their rhythms are contrasted against the verticals of a few carefully placed trees. This is exactly the kind of language I learned from Botticelli as he played off his bending figures against the wonderful vertical geometry of his window frame and floor tiles.

I didn't used to think and see in this way. Looking at art taught me how to do it. Botticelli started a thread than wound down from his paintings, through the marvelous work of the Baroque painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer, to the wonderful American masters like Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper. Looking at someone like Hopper, I can pick up that thread and wind it through my paintings like the way my rivers wind through Ascension. And I'd be honored to think some young artist is going to look and my painting, and pick up that same thread once again. It's a long thread, very long. Who knows where he or she will head with it next.

Unbroken Thread Exhibition Heads Out to Saginaw Art Museum

2011-11-16T23:10:00.009-05:00

One of the galleries in the Saginaw Art Museum

The art shippers came today and loaded 50 of my paintings onto the largest truck in America. They're taking the traveling exhibition Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch out to the Saginaw Art Museum in Michigan for its Dec. 9 opening (the show runs through Feb. 19, 2012). You can see a preview about the exhibit that Midwest Gallery Guide magazine will run in its December issue on the "News" page of my website. I'm excited to see the work in the Museum's big spaces.

The "Thread" from the exhibit's title runs back into my history and into American art history. It's a thread that ties me to the American landscape painters from the past, especially the Hudson River School. The impact their art had on me in my early days can hardly exaggerated.

Arriving in 1970 at my graduate program in painting at Indiana University I was burning with excitement to become a "real" painter. I'd mastered some hard won drawing and painting skills without a clear idea of where I wanted those skills to take me. Some of my first paintings upon arrival were attempts to paint imaginary planets. As I hadn't spent much time on such worlds these early oils were a real jumble.

Amazing as it seems to me now, at the time I had no idea what 19th century American landscape painting looked like. Fortunately the Indiana University Art Museum had a few excellent examples,

in particular a to-die-for little John Frederick Kensett coastal scene. Intrigued by that one oil painting I rummaged through the school's art library and found not only other great Kensett's but lots of other painters who spoke to me. Looking back what I was responding to was how much these old American landscapists had painted a world that looked ever so much like my boyhood home on the shore of Lake Ontario right outside of Rochester, NY.

I didn't really want to paint just like these old guys- they could be too dark and way too detailed for my eye. But these paintings had something else- a remarkable emotional connection to places I felt I knew well. The lake shore by my house was cold and rocky and could easily be mistaken for coastal Maine, one of the favorite subjects of the Hudson River School. And they had painted every corner of the New England forests. I'd grown up right next door to New England in upstate New York and those forests hadn't stopped at the state line. They blanketed my hilly neighborhood.

Most of all what I'd been looking for was a tradition I could personally relate to. These painters had painted a world that felt deeply familiar in a way my imaginary worlds never would. They put a strong steady new wind in my sails. It has taken me far.

Here's one of the pieces I sent off today, West from Monhegan, oil on panel, 28 x 42", 2009. It's the island 12 miles off the coast of Maine that has been painted by so many of a later generation of American artists- Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Robert Henri, George Bellows, and so on. This is the view looking back from Monhegan Island towards the mainland mountains near Camden, ME.

For the last 15 years or so I've adopted the practice of the older Hudson River School artists of basing my oil paintings on plein air drawings I do on location. As long time readers of this blog know, I never use photography as a source. Others can employ the camera, but for me it drains some of the magic of the experience. Working just from drawings and memory allows me to be free from the constraints of the actual observable colors that confront you.

Here's the drawing I did standing next to Monhegan's one room school house that served as my source for the above painting.

West from Monhegan, vine charcoal, 8 x 10", 2006

Another painting in the Museum show is Otter Cove, oil on canvas, 44 x 55." Otter Cove is a spot on the Atlantic side of Mount Desert Island. It's a place Thomas Cole and Frederick Church knew well. 2008 and below that is the vine charcoal I drew at Otter Cove that inspired the larger oil. As you can see, I like to move trees and islands around.

Mt. Desert Island, vine charcoal, 7 x 14", 2003

Both of these two charcoals were packed away in these heavy cardboard boxes along with the 33 other smaller works headed for the exhibit . Here they were this morning patiently waiting for the art shipper to arrive. Now that they're gone, boy does the studio seem big again. Guess I'll just have to paint something.

How Charlton Heston Made Me an Artitst

2011-11-13T09:23:00.003-05:00

Charlton Heston as Michelangelo painting the Cistine Chapel ceiling.

Sometimes at an opening reception people come up to me and innocently ask me how I became an artist. I don't ususally tell them about Charlton Heston. Sometimes the oddest things provide just the right nudge to get you moving on a new path. So it was with me and Charlton.

I came from a family of academics and was groomed to be a college professor. In the fall of 1966 I entered Oberlin College in Ohio certain I was headed for a career as a sociologist or an historian. No doubt about it. To prove my seriousness I had signed up not only for Sociology 101 my very first semester but also dutifully enrolled in an Art History survey class to get the requirement for graduation of a course "in art or music" out of the way. I was going to clear the decks so I could get serious about my budding sociology or history career. As luck would have it, my Sociology class was taught by a shy and awkward instructor who sheepishly confessed the first day that this was the first class he had ever taught and to please bear with him. Sadly, he was awful as a teacher. Following his meandering lectures wasn't for the faint hearted.

Much to my dismay, I didn't like any of my classes that Fall except for the art history class. While I'd always drawn cartoons for my friends, I'd not taken art in high school and knew zero about art history. But it was a little like going to the movies as they'd show you a couple dozen slides of paintings every class as they lectured. It was fun to pick out my favorites and which I felt didn't measure up.

In mid October I was camped out one night in the Library writing my first twenty page Sociology term paper and it was going badly. The spirited enthusiasm with which I'd started the class had drained away and I had no idea what to say about the assigned topic. I think I'd managed to write page eight when I couldn't take it anymore and threw down my pen. I had to get out of there. Spontaneously I decided to take myself to the movies. For a chronically disciplined academic over achiever like myself to do this on a "school night" bordered on treason.

Oberlin, Ohio was a small town with a one screen theater. As it turned out, the feature playing was a really dreadful Hollywood adaptation of Irving Stone's leaden novel about Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy starring that icon of all things masculine, Charlton Heston. It was pretty bad. Mostly Charlton would grip his brushes extra hard as he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling to make his biceps stand out impressively. And he sweated a lot.

One particularly cheesy scene stood out. Frustrated with the progress of his work, Charlton climbs a mountain and, reaching the summit, has a revelation as the clouds overhead transform themselves to reveal to Michelangelo the composition of The Creation of Adam section of the Sistine Ceiling. Renewed, Charlton scrambles back down the mountain and finishes off the ceiling to universal delight.

Sitting alone in the theater watching all this I felt at once both embarrassed at the obviousness of the plot and yet fascinated at the idea of an artist working with his imagination to come up with the imagery to create powerful paintings. To its credit, the film did show lots of close ups of Michelangelo's remarkable figures. I was eighteen and hungry to put some drama into my own life. And nobody from the Renaissance did drama better than Michelangelo. I left the theater and walked back to my dorm in the rain with the germ of a new idea in my head. I could be an artist. I didn't tell anyone about my experience that night as I still needed to mull over my feelings. But within a few weeks I'd made my decision, and changed all the classes I was signing up for in the next semester to include both of the College's introductory studio art classes.. I was setting out on a new voyage.

That was forty five years ago and I've painted every day since then. That Charlton Heston played a part in making me an artist isn't something I tell most people. So often when I'm making a painting I get the new idea I need to pull its composition together at an unlikely time or from an unrelated source that catches my eye. That the icon of the American firearms industry gave me that little push over the edge into the world of art has a delicious ironic touch to it. What the heck, art and artists are supposed to revel in the unexpected visions and the overlooked opportunities. So I'll take all the help I can get, even from a Hollywood B movie.

You'll excuse me but I've got to get back to flexing my biceps and sweating profusely in the studio...

Should a Normal Person Read a Blog About Art?

2011-11-10T13:38:00.002-05:00

Philip Koch, The Reach III, oil on linen, 40 x 60", 2011

Here's another of the big oils that will be debuting in the Maryland Institute College of Art's Sabbatical Exhibition Dec.1- 18th. It's an elaboration on a vision I explored earlier on two smaller oils. You might say it's an image I can't get out of my head. There's a good reason for that. It's a painting about how I learned to be an artist.

From the time I was eight until I reached twelve my father used to love to go sailing on Lake Ontario at night and he'd take me along. As a kid I confess I found nighttime a little scary so I was never as enthusiastic to go on these voyages as my father. Sometimes it was so dark what we were doing was probably foolhardy. Usually though, once your eyes adjusted, you realized there was surprising illumination. If the moon was out it bathed you in its quiet twilight tones. Sailboats are slow and unless it was blowing really hard there's often not much to do. So there was lots of time to look around. I discovered moonlight reflecting on clouds might be the most beautiful thing ever. Once we were out on the water I'd often find myself thinking "Gee, I'm glad I didn't miss this."

All of us get distracted by the pressing concerns of living, having a job (or not having one), health, relationships, and so on. Our public media pays attention to part of this, but only part, usually turning their gaze to the doings of the wealthy and powerful. Celebrities get praised for being famous. The art world isn't immune from this- witness the headlines about Sotheby's latest art auction bringing in several hundred million. But the real deal isn't any of this.

Why has every human society ever known had people who produced art? Sometimes I've wondered why they tolerate us at all- we artists can be self absorbed, egotistical, flaky, and far too often produce work of questionable quality. An awful lot of art is in fact confused or incoherent. Is there any member of the general public who hasn't wondered if artists are normal people? So why do they keep us around. Why should anyone care what an artist produces, or just as bad, what an artist writes about on an art blog (perhaps like this one)?

I like to joke with my students that artists have to become slow-witted. That we have to develop the habit of lingering on the edges of things longer than "normal" people. It's because we have a special job- to notice the stuff that everybody else overlooks. Most things aren't really very important of course, but almost everything deserves the second look to see if we've missed something. And humans miss things of value all the time. I remember reading about the painter Andrew Wyeth and his habit of looking at the ground as he walked. He told one interviewer that he liked to stop and pick up leaves to examine their color. "I see colors in some leaves I'll never be able to paint- it's maddening." Here was a guy who turned his awareness to the most subtle of qualities in fallen leaves, and he was able to turn what he learned there into some of the paintings that move millions of people.

My dad passed away shortly after those "night sails" as he liked to call them. My mother used to think he was nuts to go out on Lake Ontario in the dark. It wasn't the normal thing to do. And yet it taught me a terribly important lesson- that there is usually something unseen that we have yet to notice. And often it's something we need more of in our lives.

Ghastly Music

2011-11-06T11:50:00.004-05:00

Years ago we lived near a house where an eager teenage garage band of five boys would practice daily. Actually they weren't that near, they just played really loud. At 200 yards you couldn't miss their distinctive sound. Each of the five was determined to take the lead all the time and would amp up their part trying to drown out the guy next to him. You had no idea what parts were important and what was supposed to be the backup. They were just awful. I had to paint with the windows closed to stay sane.

Above is the new large oil I'm including in the upcoming Sabbatical Exhibition at the Maryland Institute College of Art's Dec.1- 18. It's Horizon, oil on canvas, 40 x 60." Begun last summer, I had it all blocked in with the initial layer of paint completely filling the canvas. Then I had to turn to other paintings to complete them for other shows and only returned to this canvas a few weeks ago. So it rested in my basement art storage racks for a few months.

Good things happen when you lay work aside for awhile. You forget some of your original thinking, sometimes enough to let a new and better idea to creep in.

The small oil study on which this composition was based had very intense yellows throughout the sky- not out-of-the-tube intense, but right up there nonetheless. Returning to work back into the large canvas, I began by laying in the sky. Almost immediately I noticed my earlier initial band of yellow in lowest section of sky was much less intense than I wanted. It looked timid and tentative. I was going for bold skies- you know, dramatic, assertive, masculine, daring, etc.

Figuring I'd get to intensifying that area soon enough I busied myself with the upper sky and the water's reflections for about two weeks. Their color got gradually ramped up in intensity and contrasts.That's when things started shifting on me.

You know you're on to something in a painting when you find yourself absentmindedly returning to gaze at the same area over and over again. In this case it was that left-over too faint yellow strip at the bottom of the sky. What was happening was that the painting had developed along a different path, one that was right next to the one I thought I was on but leading to a different destination. The story had become about the drama between subtlety and sharp intensity- bright yellow playing off against a pale cream yellow. It was just too good to pass up, so I changed gears.

To give the pale section of the sky some extra impact I went back into the larger yellow sky and darkened it everywhere (in the process easily using up twenty bucks of cadmium yellow pigment). Against a darker (though more intense) yellow sky the light cream-colored strip would have something it could sharply contrast against.

Artists get into tricky waters when they work with something subtle. If you fail to make your choices look deliberate, the subtle things can read as indecisive and vague rather than elegant in its restraint. Good art is really the dance you do between forcefulness and using a light touch. Too much of just one and the whole thing goes down the tubes.

I don't know what happened to our band of youthful musicians. One day they mercifully just stopped playing. Paintings can look like that band sounded with every color reaching for the spotlight. As individual pigments coming out of the tube they're just lovely in their pristine intensity, but corralled together they're a mishmash like those terrible green musicians. I'd like to think that band just got a new practice space and began listening to their overall sound instead of just their own parts. I do know when I've fallen into being aggressive everywhere in a painting I'm working on I start to hear the echos of their songs.

A Secret from Vermeer

2011-11-01T21:55:00.003-04:00

I know there's something wrong with the image above.

It's a good thing to turn things on their head from time to time- impossible problems in life and in painting sometimes will offer up a solution once looked at this way. My wife the psychotherapist often tells me a big part of what she doing with her patients is just helping them see their problems from another angle. Above is Vermeer's iconic Girl with a Pearl Earring standing on her head for us (artist's models back in the 1600's were much more dedicated than today and were will to pose like this). Here below she's righted herself again for us.

I often turn my paintings upside down to study them with an eye towards improving them. You notice the relationships differently. It's guaranteed you will see something you've not seen before. I want to make a couple of observations about Vermeer's portrait as a companion to the comments I made about the same painting in my previous post.

When he painted this one Vermeer was in touch with the sitter, the space of the room, the light, the textures of skin and fabric, the play of colors. Probably more by intuition than by conscious design, he gradually pushed and pulled his image in a thousand little adjustments until it felt just right. To me this is one of those paintings where everything seems exactly as it has to be. I'd like to talk about just one seemingly small aspect of the painting's composition Vermeer uses to make us feel the this woman's depth of personality.

Especially upside down, the intensity of the white collar is striking. Almost always a move that emphatic is going to find a responding echo somewhere else in the painting. Look carefully at the collar and follow its curve up from the woman's front at the left to where it straightens out to a gradually rising diagonal line about at its middle point. From there on over to where it disappears at the back of her neck it has a more or less straight line trajectory that runs exactly at 90 degrees to the straight far right outer edge of the falling yellow scarf.

This is not an accident. Painters for centuries have placed diagonal lines in their paintings and related them to other diagonals that are positioned exactly at a right angle to their first line. Without realizing what they are seeing, the viewer emotionally senses the connection between the woman's white collar in the middle of sitter and the far right edge of her costume. Vermeer convinces us that this is the only possible head adornment this woman could ever wear.

I believe this is hard wired into our psychology. Perhaps it stems from our need to intuitively grasp for right angle relationships between the flat ground and the vertical axis we make when we stand erect. When you were one year old and struggling to take your first steps unaided, you felt great when you didn't tumble back down to the floor. To stand and walk you had to internalize a mental picture of your body's vertical axis standing at a 90 degree angle to the floor. While out of your conscious awareness, this learned new skill gave you a new power to walk and later to run. It made you feel powerful and safe. What's not to like?

I believe we search out ninety degree angles all the time as we scan a painting. Naturally we see them all over in vertical walls and horizontal table tops- no surprise there. But when this angle is found between two diagonal lines, where one wouldn't be expecting it, it brings a little surge of excitement and feeling of well being. It feels a little like finding you've got an extra twenty stuck in your wallet you'd forgotten about.

Should an aspiring painter start inserting "these diagonal lines at right angles" devices all over their paintings? No. But very often as you are working you will find this relationship hinted at in the forms emerging on their canvas (this goes just as much for abstract work as realist painting). As you become aware of this tendency consider how it could be accentuated to heighten the response in your viewers' eyes.

The woman's collar and scarf probably didn't at first line up the way they did at the end. Vermeer like any painter moved things around, tweaked this and that, worried a lot, and finally arrived at this wonderful painting. My guess is he was both inspired and very stubborn, determined to discover the precise arrangement of his forms needed to deliver the emotional impact he so wanted. That he was so in touch with the expressive potential hidden in his composition is a great gift to us who have come after him.

Vermeer and the woman who sat for him are long gone from us. But then there is this mysterious painting that quietly radiates with its glowing light. In a way it feels almost more real than anything else I encountered today. Vermeer is gone, but something he set in motion with this woman 350 years ago still moves us today. Let's enjoy this painting, but let's also learn some of its secrets.

How to Eat Oil Paint

2011-10-29T09:52:00.001-04:00

Here's a detail out of an oil by Jan Vermeer (Dutch, 1632 - 1675, which means the guy only made it to 43 and still produced so much amazing art). It's one of his most loved images, Girl with a Pearl Earring. I think it's fabulous. Below is an oil by Jean Michel Basquiat (American, 1960 - 1988). Long time readers of this blog probably know Basquiat is one of those painters I believe is seriously overrated.

What's the difference between these two paintings that leads me to think so highly of Vermeer?

Art and food have much in common.

When I was young something that made a big impression on me were Christmas cookies. Other times of the year my mother would sometimes bake cookies, an activity I always approved of. While they always tasted good (and yes, the chocolate chip ones were the best) they weren't much to look at- modest little lumps of squashed down cookie dough.

Once a year though out would come something special- our Xmas cookie cutters. I would be given the elite tasks of rolling the dough flat with a cool wooden rolling pin and then, best of all, pressing these

metal shapes into the soft dough. At age 6, this was high art!

I used to conduct an endless internal debate about which of the shapes was the most beautiful- was it the angel, even though her wing had an obnoxious tendency to break off when it was time to remove the baked cookie from the cookie sheet, or was the more reliable bell shape or perhaps the serviceable Xmas tree? Looking back I realize this was probably the first time I was consciously evaluating silhouettes for their expressive potential. My six year old taste buds were convinced cutting out the cookies into these special shapes really did make the cookie batter bake into a tastier cookie. In this early simple way, the power of visual art had me in its sway.

Look back up to the Vermeer and the Basquiat paintings above. Both have silhouettes of course. But Basquiat throws down a shape and leaves it just the way it came out on the first pass. It's purposely haphazard, a sort of self consciously casual attitude the artist hopes will say to us "I chose not to be careful, could have done it more precisely but I want you to notice how sloppy I was." There's sort of an adolescent defiance to it that perhaps appeals to some the first time they see his work. How long it will continue to intrigue us is more open to question (for me the intrigue was short lived).

Vermeer drew and re-drew the outer contours of the woman's cheek, jaw and neck to get them just so.

There's a coming together of a deeply intuitive and insightful artist caressing the forms into the most expressive possible arrangement. The carefulness, patience, and judgement all say to the viewer "this is exactly the way these forms need to be." To me Vermeer is claiming the visual high ground here. He's telling us that being alive is something special, and that at certain moments we can all grasp its significance. He's going to try his darndest to help us see how certain poses and lighting reveal meaning.

I started talking about silhouettes by using the concrete example of cookie cutter shapes (and I bet as a kid Vermeer had some similar experience to mine in the kitchen). And paintings almost always begin with the artist considering her or his choice of flat shapes. They're building the foundation as if they're about to construct a house. Then they pour in their cooking ingredients into the carefully composed network of shapes.

Vermeer would have had to grind his own pigments, a laborious and tedious process that did however give the artist an intimate knowledge of the paint- its exact intensity of hue, its viscosity, the fineness of its texture and so on. Like an expert chief painstakingly selecting their ingredients, the artist "pours" the color into the shapes, then slowly stirs and simmers the mix until the adjoining strokes of color meet up with their neighbors just right. Look at the two cheeks in the Vermeer- how beautifully he pushes the left cheek towards cooler greys and pulls the color in the right cheek closer to warm orange/yellow browns. The flow of color is so subtle you can't see where it is that cool turns into warm, but you feel the change.

Look at the remarkable expressiveness of the woman's eyes, especially the prominence Vermeer gives to the whites of her eyes. To make that happen he had to push the highlights on her cheeks down to a light middle grey tone even in the cheek's lightest highlight. This is an artist who's eye could see many things at once and balance the various "flavors" off against each other. Vermeer shows us chords of colors instead on one color at a time.

Basquiat in contrast paints the background black, stops, then picks up a tube of a red and plays with that and stops again. Then the white follows, and finally he splashes on a yellow. Fine tuning, adjusting, reconsidering all are out of place in this one-shot-and-we're-done world. It's immediate, but the aftertaste may leave one wanting.

Back in my boyhood kitchen in addition to the Xmas cookies I used to love to eat pancakes with maple syrup (see below). Whether Vermeer ate such things I have no idea. But I remember my 6 year old tongue thinking the syrup tasted "really, really good." It's that sense of celebration I find in Vermeer's mysterious painting.

In another life perhaps Vermeer and Basquiat became chiefs. Based on how they cooked up their paintings, I think I'll get a table over at Vermeer's Diner. I hear you can usually get a table at Basquiats' Bistro.

Art in Embassies

2011-10-24T21:20:00.009-04:00

Philip Koch, Recollection, oil on canvas, 36 x 72", 2000

Every few years Sarah Tanguy, Curator of the Art in Embassies Program of the U.S. State Department, asks to borrow some of my paintings to hang in one of their Embassies somewhere around the world. Three more large oils just headed off for the Embassy in Guyana in South America.

I like the three selections Ambassador Brent Hardt and his wife Saskia made- they hang together beautifully as a thematic group. About fifteen years ago my paintings began to shift away from reporting on actual places towards a more imaginative stance. I began visualizing the earth as it might have existed long before we humans left our mark on her. In many ways this was my personal version of the theme of the "new Eden" that was a weighty symbol in 19th century American landscape from Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School on.

To the eyes of the arriving European colonists, the America's seemed a vast unspoiled wilderness. Largely ignoring the native populations that were already here, landscape artists thrilled to depict this new expanse of what they imagined to be untouched nature. The paintings they produced are a remarkable celebration. Their paintings of wilderness conveyed a surging optimism, almost a crystallized vision of nature's awesome powers of expansiveness and creativity. Few other periods in painting convey the sense of our planet as a fertile, living thing the way the 19th century Americans did. Cole, Kensett, Gifford, Inness, and the others at their best are show stoppers.

My work takes a second look at this tradition of paintings of the vast natural world. In our time the enduring power of nature seems more fragile that it did for our 19th century painters, and perhaps because of that it takes on an added urgency.

To me these aren't simply literal places but rather landscapes evoking a state of mind. My hope is they re-kindle our intuitive creative sides. Inventiveness, insight, wholeness, energy, promise are all words I'd use to describe what I'm after with this work. It owes a great debt to my artist forefathers. The themes that so fascinated them need to be re-visited by contemporary eyes.

Philip Koch, Yellow Arcadia, oil on panel, 30 x 40"

Arcadia was a word that comes to us from ancient Greece. It was a mountainous region considered to be the most beautiful landscape, and the term has come to mean an ideal landscape. I love posing the question- what would the perfect land look like? Yellow Arcadia is one answer.

Philip Koch, The Voyage, oil on canvas, 38 x 38", 2000

This painting is the cousin of the similar composition The Voyage of Memory that is included in my eight museum traveling exhibition Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch. This one came first and used a sloop (with two sails) to make the perilous journey through these too narrow passages. The image is indebted to Thomas Cole's famous four painting series The Voyage of Life, now in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. The painting is actually highly autobiographical and I made a second version using a cat boat (single sail) instead as it more accurately reflected my boyhood experiences. The narrow passage was suggest to me by the high banks of the Irondequoit Bay just off of Lake Ontario about a mile from my home in upstate New York. I rely heavily on memory as well as imagination to make these paintings.

How to Beat Up on your Art

2011-10-21T11:03:00.011-04:00

A few years ago I saw a wonderful Wayne Thiebaud exhibit at the Phillips Collection down in Washington, D.C. Thiebaud was one of the very few realist painters you'd ever see reproduced in the art magazines back in the late 1960's. Probably because the editors thought his paintings of pies and cakes dovetailed with the then super hot Pop Art phenomenon, they figured they could show such stuff without being considered "provincial." (I love the art world, but it's not a perfect place. It sometimes worrys way too much about whether it is cool enough). Me, I liked Thiebaud because he created such brilliant light as in the painting of slices of pie above. Often his work is best viewed right before lunch.

This was the first really comprehensive show of Thiebaud I'd seen and it brought me face to face with many paintings I'd loved for years from having seen them only in reproductions. Frankly the show freaked me out.

Half the paintings were damaged, some very badly, with concentric cracks in the oil paint radiating out from impacts the pigment surface had suffered (Thiebaud's oils were particularly vulnerable to this as they were very thickly painted over stretched canvas. When they were hit hard, the canvas would stretch further while the dry oil paint wouldn't, causing serious cracking). And these same paintings had old and heavily scratched up frames.

The other half of the show had oils in perfect condition (zero cracks). These paintings had top of the line frames, sometimes elegant gold leaf and snazzy custom fitted hardwood combinations. There was nothing to distract your eye from the pure visual sensuality the artist intended.

It struck me, Thiebaud started out just like every other painter, an unknown selling his work at very modest prices. His good fortune was that his work caught on with enough wealthy art collectors that it started to be taken seriously. Grabbing more attention from art magazines, museum curators, art writers, etc. And of course his prices went up, eventually way up. When that happens, galleries start handling your work with white glove treatment. The work starts traveling around the country in museum quality crates built and packed by professional art handlers. People who know what they're doing.

Earlier in his career, Thiebaud was framing his work as best he could and doing this on the limited budget almost all artists face. And art galleries showing his work treated it pretty roughly often enough for it to show the painful scars so apparent in the show at the Phillips Collection.

This whole Thiebaud business made a big impression on me.

One of the things I've worked very hard to do with my own work is see to it that it's professionally handled. My just completed show at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center was both my largest exhibition to date (50 paintings) and one of my best. PFAC hung the work in a way that said "this is important art." The walls were freshly painted, the lighting was well aimed, and the wall text informed the viewers about the art without getting in the way. I think Wayne Thiebaud would have been pleased to see his work treated this way.

Here are two photo's from the PFAC show:

By nature I'm not a very organized person (just ask my long suffering wife Alice). Some months ago I even wrote a blog post about how a certain amount of studio clutter helps me be creative. I seem to need to stumble across paintings I'd temporarily put out of my mind to do my best work. That's all well and good.

But an artist's job isn't done when they place their final brushstroke on a painting- far from it. So many times I've found overtaxed art dealers don't have time to keep good records of the work you've sent them on consignment. They may handle 30 or 50 artists in their gallery. Work is always being hauled out to show a client, hung and then re-hung in this and that show, and sent out on approval to potential collectors. It's sort of a musical-chairs-from-hell game. Most dealers try hard to stay on top of it and to not damage the artwork, but things happen.

I'm fortunate in that many hundreds of collectors own my work all over the country and that the prices for my paintings have gradually risen. As they have, I've noticed my work seems to get damaged less

(perhaps we could call this the Thiebaud Principle of art handling).

But I confess in the old days, I didn't store my work as carefully as I could have and my record keeping was less than systematic. Gradually I've been doing better. And I'm spending a lot more time wrapping and packaging my art when I ship it out of state to another show. It arrives in perfect shape, and the care I've taken in wrapping it send a subtle message "this is valuable."

Here's a photograph of my storage area in my studio. These are the 14 largest paintings included in the Unbroken Thread show that was just at PFAC. Next month they're being carried out to the Saginaw Art Museum for their Dec. 9th opening of this same exhibition.

The racks are sturdy as all heck, raised up off the floor to guard against spills. They have vertical braces every five canvas or so to keep everybody from leaning too hard on their neighbor. I buy huge sheets of corrugated cardboard from Uline company to stack in between the canvases.

My storage area was a work in progress for many years- gradually getting more organized and safer for its residents. As I surveyed the finished project I said to myself "Now I'm armed for bear!"

Life is short, Art is Long goes the old saying. It's true, but only if someone takes care of the work. Viewing those beaten up early Wayne Thiebaud paintings traumatized me. It's not impossible to take care of work and ship it all around the world safely if you want to. You just have to think of your art as being like a stick of butter on a hot day- the most vulnerable thing in the world just waiting for the accident to happen.

Above is an oil by the great 19th century French painter/printmaker Daumier of a collector examining prints I've always liked. Maybe Daumier imagined this collector was looking at his own prints. Artists have to realize they're part of a long chain stretching far back into history. All made work that reflects the uniqueness of their lives and their times for posterity. Daumier did, and Thiebaud and Rembrandt and all our great art fore bearers did. When you stand in the National Gallery of Art in D.C. and look at their Rembrandt self portrait you're seeing a painting that old Rembrandt knocked himself out to paint, but also to protect and preserve. Art lasts because someone has loved and nurtured it into lasting. I'm really glad people started taking better care of Wayne Thiebaud's paintings.

I'd like very much if they'd take care of mine as well. So I've gone to war against misplaced art and art getting damaged. Look out world!

Looking at Old Friends

2011-10-15T12:04:00.003-04:00

The mark of a really good painting is its ability to keep showing you new things even over long period of time. Sometimes 40 years.

Above is an old friend of mine, Edward Hopper's Western Motel. When I was in graduate school at Indiana University getting my MFA in painting from 1970-72 I taped a postcard of this painting on the outside of my studio door. You could see it from a long way away as you were coming down the hall. The funny thing was I always liked it best when I was ten or more feet out and less when I was close enough to see the details. Still, I kept it hanging there on my door for well over a year.

I'd forgotten all of this until 5 minutes ago when scanning through a pile of Hopper images on Google and a tiny thumbnail of this Hopper pricked my memory. This oil to me isn't one of Hopper's strongest, though I obviously have a nostalgic attachment. What I didn't care for was the stiffness of the figure and the sparseness of the interior. This is an imagined composition, based no doubt on a couple of the long driving trips Hopper and his wife Jo took out west. Constructed entirely from what Hopper could recall from memory and invent in the studio, it feels a little cold.

But even when he was a little off his game, Hopper can be pretty good. What caught my eye this morning was something I must have sensed all those hundreds of times I glanced at that old grad school postcard without being conscious of it. There's a rhythm to the tops of the low mountains in the far distance- one is completely level, then the two just in front of that slope down and then up again. To me the most elegant pass my eye can take over the painting is sweeping in from the right hand side, descending along the first ridge line and riding upwards on the middle mountain. Then jumping to the inside, the top of the sunlight on the wall over the bed cascades downward again. Leave it to Hopper to come up with an ingenious way to knit inside and outside toghether.

My intuition is this was all invented as Hopper painted, sensing his interior and the frame of the windows alone would have felt just too vertical and box-like. It's little things like this that make all the difference in paintings. Check out the little strip of a window at the far right side- I'm guessing that too is an invention Hopper inserted just to let the mountains' silhouettes play a bigger role.

Here's an earlier Hopper that I would have hung on my studio door instead had I been able to fine a postcard of it (sometimes you just gotta settle..). It's Cape Cod Afternoon and its quirky assembling of architectural shapes suggest to me he based it on some drawings he did on site. It's at once too weird to think up while being totally believable. That's a quality one so often finds in Hopper, the simple making of the improbable combinations of shapes and colors look completely possible and delightfully ordinary.

There must be at least 25 separate walls and windows in his pile of barns and houses, yet he pushes them all together as a solid wedge of architecture pushing into the painting from the left. Then to keep the view on their toes, he accents his undulating grassy fields with two extremely sharp triangles of shadows. For my money, there's nobody who could paint a field of tall grasses as well as Hopper. They're soft and solid at the same time. Usually done with little or even no detail at all, they still convey exactly the textural feel of millions of soft, fibrous stalks all standing and waving together. How the heck does he do it?!

One last point- color. Hopper ramps up the saturation of his ochre green grasses almost as far as they will go. Then to contrast that and cool your eye off again, he paints the blue-grey off-white shadows on the right end of the buildings as an island of calm.

Are Artists Nuts?

2011-10-11T23:10:00.002-04:00

Philip Koch, North Passage, oil on canvas, 45 x 60", 2011

Sometimes I think we artists all have a kind of "divine madness." Other times I think we're just nutty.

We spend an inordinate amount of time focused on what's happening in our studios. We stop reading books, watching television, or going to football games. Sometimes I realize it's been days since I spoke to anyone but my wife.

When I was a boy I had a dog, Vicky, a sweet mutt who looked like an Irish Setter having a bad hair day. She might have been my favorite member of the family. One thing she did fascinated me. My mother would get bones from the butcher and give one to the dog about once a week. To Vicki this was a big deal. She'd have at the thing the first day like it still needed subduing. Then the next few days she'd settle down and just gnaw away at the thing for hours a day. Curious, I'd pick up the bone after a day or two of her doggy administrations. Every molecule of edible material by then had been stripped away but that wouldn't stop her. Days more chewing ensued as she soldiered on, certain only a bit more chewing would somehow split the thing open to offer up some further delicious meaty goodness. It never did, but she'd usually do 4-5 days on the darned things before losing hope and interest. She was a living monument to determination.

When I was a young artist I worked like mad to learn everything so I could paint genuinely accomplished work. As years went by I learned it usually took way longer to make a painting reach its potential than I'd originally imagined.

So often we artists are asked the question at one of our exhibits "How long did it take you to paint this painting?' I have to bite my tongue not to say to the questioner "a heck of a lot longer than you're thinking."

Paintings most of the time have to be allowed to grow slowly to reach their deepest level of success. Sure sometimes you can get lucky on a small one and blast it out successfully in one sitting (though I almost always stand when painting). But most of time it's about going back into paintings, nudging them up a inch to a higher level, then going back in again later to do the same again, and then once again. On some of my large oil landscapes (like the one above) I can say with no fear of contradiction I've painted 40 different treatments for the sky before I got what I wanted. We're talking serious hours here.

This process is not the same as my old dog Vicky going after her bone, as it usually does in the end succeed in finally kicking the darned paintings up to that last plateau where they're fully realized, accomplished, surprising, authentic, and all those good things. But on any given day before you finally pull the thing off, you're not so different that that crazy dog, chewing and chewing away out of some inner faith working away at a piece will eventually (you're never sure when) pay off. I like to think of myself as insightful and inventive. Sometimes though like the dog I'm just too stubborn to quit. Maybe that's part of the work you have to do to make the magic happen.

The irony is that once you've invested so much of yourself and your time in making your art you're then really obligated to your paintings to find an audience for them. Having shows, doing the publicity, shipping, etc. is part of the dues you pay to make your original investment of time in your studio meaningful. Is it something of a vicious circle? In my darker moments I wonder if this all isn't some kind of runaway narcissism. Was Rembrandt insufferably self-absorbed? I don't know. I hope not. I like to think its possible to produce world class work and still be a rounded person who's involved with others and the outer world.

I do know Vicky wasn't a narcissist. She loved everyone in the family, was always happy to see us and was never too tired to keep one company on a walk through the woods. I'm pretty sure she loved her life most of the time with admirable doggy self acceptance. Determined, persistent, but also a real accept-life-on-its-own-terms kind of gal. If there was something good going on she's be sure to enjoy it. In her own way I think she had a very balanced life. Did I mention she was my favorite member of the family?

Edward Hopper's Poetry of Empty Rooms

2011-10-08T17:15:00.004-04:00

I've just been invited by Rachael Solomon who is the Program Director of the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, NY to have a mini solo show in one of their galleries.. We'll be showing some of my paintings of the interior of Edward Hopper's Cape Cod studio where I've had the great pleasure of enjoying 13 residencies since 1983. The Edward Hopper House Art Center is the boyhood home of the famous American realist artist. So much of what Hopper became stemmed from his early years there. So I'm excited to do the exhibit. It will be coming up in March through May of 2012.

Hopper didn't teach. Yet I learned more about how to become a good painter by studying his work than by any other single thing. Art after all is visual. Words, even beautifully and aptly spoken can get in the way. And Hopper was legendarily tactiturn. I suspect had someone asked Hopper how to paint an empty room, his terse reply would have been "Don't!".

Above is one of his last oil paintings, Sun in an Empty Room from 1963. It's the emptiest of all the rooms he ever painted. Yet it draws you in and holds your attention as well as any richly appointed interior. How did he do this? In a way he followed the imaginary advice I have him giving above- his room only appears empty. The boldness of the sunlight on the wall bowls you over it is so bright. As you look longer you come to see the thousands of gradations from slightly lighter to slightly darker. And his yellow walls are actually a family of yellows migrating from warmer to cooler and from more intensely colored to more silvery and greyed-out.

I used to have a teacher in my graduate painting program at Indiana University, Ron Markman, whose favorite painting word was "orchestration." And that's just what Hopper does here- he sneaks into the walls all sorts of information about the little flickering changes in the lights and the shadows and orchestrates them into a symphony. Hopper's "empty" walls seem alive enough to start breathing.

One funny thing about the painting is the perspective he used. It's an invented space and Hopper casually breaks the rules about how perspective orthogonal lines are supposed to gradually converge to a distant vanishing point. His careen together at impossible angles, but it matters not at all. So firm is his hand telling you to focus on the shapes of the sunlight and the shadows that 99% of his viewers will never notice.

Above is an old favorite, Rooms by the Sea, from the Yale University Art Museum. I've written about this painting before. It's an architecturally accurate rendering of his painting room and his adjacent bedroom in his studio in S. Truro, MA on Cape Cod. But wanting the walls to come to life, Hopper tells a big lie. In reality those walls face due north. Sunlight never falls directly on them. Imagine this painting without the drama of those diagonal sunlight shapes breaking up the walls. They would indeed be too empty and the painting's amazing energy would drain away to nothing.

And below is another not quite as empty painting by Hopper from earlier in his career. It's remarkable as most of it is just the unadorned orange wall. But using the exact same device of diagonal sunlight breaking up the empty expanse, Hopper infuses the picture with a pulsating liveliness.

Hopper in this Girl at a Sewing Machine is orchestratring his empty wall space to dance with the figure. Look at how the long straight hair going over her shoulder and her bangs travel across the painting's surface at just the same angle as the shadows from the window frame move across the wall. This is a connection Hopper has installed into his painting that probably never really existed. But it connects the woman with the space around her in a way we come to love.

It's not that Hopper is saying don't paint empty space. Rather his work shows how to make emptiness resonate with feeling. He invents little surprises of tones, changes in his color, and subtle interconnections with his shapes to make the empty seem full.

More Sharp Teeth

2011-10-05T23:21:00.001-04:00

The experience of living can be like trying to take a drink from a fire hose- there's just too much coming at you too fast.

In the previous post I talked about using drawings to pare down the overwhelming complexity to make the sense of it. Paintings that try to encompass everything fail every time. The irony is we have to back away from a direct confrontation with nature if we're going to make landscape paintings that can ever do her justice. Making drawings is a way to do that, stripping away color and dealing just with shapes and darks and lights. It's getting down to essentials.

I'm illustrating this post with more of the series of vine charcoal drawings I did last week up in the Adirondack Mountains in northernmost New York State. I've been going there regularly for the last half dozen years and feel I get a better understanding of the potential of those mountains for making paintings with each visit.

When I was still an undergraduate art major at Oberlin College I discovered the critical role making drawings played in Rembrandt's process. He did hundreds of them of all sort of subjects. He always tended towards radically simplifying most of the details in favor of an overall mood, light, sense of movement and an elegant but unpretentious drama. I used to pour over his drawings for hours. Back then I couldn't understand their appeal as clearly as I do today, but their pull on me was profound. Rembrandt, through his work, taught me deep lessons about how to see the expressive side of forms and light. Four hundred years after he died he had a really, really eager student in me.

One other thing about drawings. Sometimes we really do have BIG ideas. Grand panoramic visions that need a huge canvas to get realized. But more often I think our best ideas come to use in just the other fashion. The sort of tip toe in, appearing at first to us as just hints of what they might become. If you don't have a quick way to capture these ephemeral little insights right when they appear, you're likely to loose them (good ideas love nothing better than to slip away again if you don't grab a hold of them). A drawing is fast- it summarizes more than it describes (especially the kind of soft vine charcoal drawings I make). It's the art equivalent of a good butterfly net- a medium able to capture a delicate winged little creature without hurting it).

Down below is a photo of me standing near the summit of Whiteface Mountain looking southwest towards the Adirondack High Peaks.

Sharpening your teeth.

2011-10-02T21:52:00.000-04:00

Does the world really need any more landscape paintings? If by that one means more of the work where the default setting is best described as "sweet", "restful" or "softly flowing" I'd say probably not.

Reality has a sharp edge. It cuts though our outworn habits. When I'm painting I often hear the phrase "Nature has teeth"whispering in my ear. What I mean is that in finding her real beauty I'm going to discover something that comes with a jarring, a slightly unsettling surprise.

Each generation sees a little differently than the one that went before. We need somebody to look hard at the world with eyes unencumbered by outworn blinders and expectations of just the predictable, The earth has a pulsing energy that always lies just a bit hidden from our view. For me working directly from nature has become my key tool- sort of like magnetic compass- to lead me toward the best of the unexpected that's out there.

I'm just back from a week long painting trip in the Adirondack Mountains of northernmost New York State. These days when I work outside I usually draw in vine charcoal instead of painting in oil. What I'm after is the space, the light, and the specific shapes of the locale.

So I go out with one of my portable easels to make "working drawings", pieces that may serve down the road as a basis for an oil painting, perhaps a very large one. I work in vine charcoal as it helps me pare down the overwhelming complexity of the landscape into a few elemental forms. Its soft and always-ready-to-smear black dust forces a selective eye on you. It makes you radical, cutting out all but the shapes that pack the biggest expressive punch.

Above is a 9 x 12" as yet untitled drawing from the town of Lake Placid looking west. My goal was to leave foreground very light and play that off against a middle and far distance where the forms have been pushed darker than in real life. The foreground is held to basically two overlapping white and then off-white "stage flats" of foliage. While more detail could have been added to those trees in front, I was afraid it would allow them to drift into darker tones, lessening their difference from the more distant spaces.

So too above in this drawing of trees along the shore of Lake Placid itself (the town of Lake Placid is actually located on the adjoining Mirror Lake, just to confuse people). Here a shadowed interval wedged between two taller stands of trees is pushed far darker than in real life. At the tops of those tallest trees I've resorted to heavily outlining the silhouettes to keep their harsh, jagged rhythm clear against the sky. To resort to more detail of the finer branches and leaves here, on such a small scale drawing (12 x 9") would have diluted the impact of the drawing.

Here below is our hard working artist a few hundred feet below the summit of Whiteface Mountain working on another drawing. A lesser artist would have taken advantage of the convenient toll road that winds its way to the mountain top, but of course I shunned such inauthenticity and backpacked my way up the 3000' rise to gain the perfect view. Ironically I ended up right next to the aforementioned roadway.

With me is a "half box" french easel, some foam core boards to hold some cut-down sheets of Rives BFK etching paper (a terrific surface for charcoal drawing), my carpenter's square to measure out even rectangles on the paper, assorted erasers, a soft leather chamois skin for blending the charcoal, masking tape, soft vine charcoal sticks, and ziplock plastic bags to hold everything. Oh and if it's hot, water.

And here below is one of the small drawings I was working on in the above photo, a closeup selection of the wild ins and outs made by the irregular islands that largely fill up Lake Placid. Such odd but endearing shapes- things like this I could never just think up. I need to find it out in the weirdness of nature.

Rage and Turmoil

2011-09-29T17:54:00.002-04:00

And you thought you were having a bad day...

In the popular imagination artists are pictured as passionate. And honestly when I think of what it takes to stay at the easel making paintings over a lifetime, I think that word nails our personalities well. But I've come to the conclusion that emotions can to be too strong for an artist to tackle directly. Cezanne once said that while art wasn't the same as nature, it travels on a track that runs parallel to nature. It like that.

The above painting comes as close to a nightmare as any I've ever seen. At times of distress I've found myself looking through Google Images searching for this gruesome oil. It's Goya's Saturn Eating His Children. It's so ghastly I feel bowled over by it. And while I feel it's better than anything Damien Hirst will ever do, it's not one of Goya's better pieces. The image shocks us with its biting graphic action, but after you've seen that I think it doesn't offer that much of a second act for one's eye.

The ability to be passionately involved with one's idea is right at the heart of art. But to make a painting people are going to want to return to over and over one has to master an additional task- detachment.

Painters have to go to all the corners and recesses of the painting, far away from the "action" and find new things to say there as well. Any painting with staying power is one where all the forms and colors are intriguing in their own right. The forms themselves have to have to do the singing, not just describe the action. In the Goya for example, I feel Saturn's eyes are so dominant that they overpower the rest of the painting.

Quite by accident I tripped over the painting below. It's a painting by Emil Nolde (German, 1867- 1956) Sunflowers in the Windstorm from the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. After viewing the ripped flesh of the previous painting, this one might at first seem pretty tame. But compare it to all the paintings of flowers you've seen. 95% of them border on saccharine and are predictably painted. It's pretty hard to say something fresh about a yellow flower, but that's exactly what this Nolde fellow managed to do.

Sunflowers are usually painted very yellow, but Nolde plays against our expectations by switching to an orange/ochre blossom at left and two extremely pale flowers on the right. To build their intensity he focuses instead on expressively shaping the petals into a distinctive rhythm.

And what a wonderful contrast the pale light of the foreground has against the stormy mystery of the sky. It seems daylight in front and night in the heavens. Nolde's authoritative paint handling lays down both with similar strokes and convincingly knits together two worlds that shouldn't really be connected. The sky reminds me ever so much of the earlier work of the decidedly un-modernist American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917). Like Ryder, Nolde builds a flowing network of darks that move across the canvas from side to side as a counterpoint to the stated round blossoms.

Is the Nolde painting better than the Goya? To me it is something I could live with over time while the chomping Saturn seems more of an image designed for a one-shot shock. I'm glad Goya painted it because it is so hellish, and we humans have to find forms to express these most difficult sides of our lives. It's a perverse sort of comfort to know that Goya, at least once and a while, felt really really awful-

(you and I aren't the only ones to sometimes have to face that).

But to me art also serves to show us how to have a little distance on turmoil. We don't know for sure whether our sunflowers will survive this storm, but Nolde gives them a fighting chance. His painting seems more a dialogue between violence and grace. Knocking the tenor of his storm down a little bit he's made a more emotionally durable painting.

Art is long: Life is short goes the saying. Nolde's flowers seem ready to go the distance.

How to Lead an Art Tour

2011-09-22T21:42:00.002-04:00

My first ever trip to an art museum was in elementary school. We were taken to the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY. Perhaps it was in 4th or 5th grade. I saw the museum's major Winslow Homer painting of his Prout's Neck, Maine studio glimpsed through the heavy fog. Even as a kid I'd heard of Homer as my parents had a wonderful print by Homer hanging over our living room couch. "Hey"I thought, "that's the guy we've got at home!" Obviously I was a real art world insider. The musuem's Homer was and is a terrific painting, the only piece I remember from that early tour. Seeing as I am obsessed with painting rocky shorelines to this day, I know that early museum trip had an impact far greater than I then suspected.

The Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Newport News, VA, where my show Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch is showing through Oct. 2 brings a lot of tour groups through its facility to see its exhibitions. Many are school groups. And the tours are led by docents that the museum trains themselves. They recently held a session to help docents get up to speed with things to tell the visiting groups to engage them in the exhibitions.

Above Janet Rash (at left) who heads up PFAC's Education Department, is enjoying talking with the docents about my show. Here are a few more pictures from that session, with participants taking turns speaking about my paintings. If I'd been there I probably would have learned something. (The photos are

courtesy of PFAC and were taken by PFAC's intern Teddy Fatiou).

This is by far the largest exhibition I've had with fully 50 paintings, drawings, and pastels.

Below is my The Voyage of Memory.

Below at the right is the oil Eye of the Sea.

And one of my favorites in the show is the tiny Forest Stream below at the left.

Newport News is way down in the Southeast corner of Virginia, right where the huge Chesapeake Bay opens up to the Atlantic (I'm up at the opposite end of the Chesapeake in Baltimore). Heading west from Newport News you eventually hit the Appalachian Mountains. That's where my other Virginia exhibit just opened. It's right outside of Charlottesville in the tiny village of Barboursville. There are vineyards there and people come through to tour those. Many stop at the Nichols Gallery who is running three small solo shows of landscapes through Oct. 30. Here's the announcement card they just sent out:

Light Revealing/Light Concealing

2011-09-20T21:18:00.003-04:00

Here's Rembrandt as a young man. Think of how many self portraits you've seen where the painter's eyes stare out at you as the key feature of the painting. Not so here. Rembrandt's having a ball playing around with the light direction, bringing out only the shapes on his skull he feels best evoke the feeling he's after. Instead of a left eye we're given a darkened bird's nest of an eye socket with a bottom left edge carved by the turning silhouette of the artist's cheekbone. Cleverly, Rembrandt interests us the thing next to the eye we wanted to see.

The portrait is of course lit from behind, pushing the whole right side of the chin, jaw, and neck and far shoulder into a flat dark silhouette. We don't see much of his lower lip, but we don't miss it as the empty space right under his jaw seems to glow with its own shimmering personality. It's as if Rembrandt is painting himself by painting a portrait of the space next to his head.

It might at first seem an odd choice for light direction as it conceals so much of the detail of the artist's features. But by holding back from us the details we'd expected to see Rembrandt has gained something else. He makes a more surprising composition that draws us in and leaves us intrigued. What's going on in this young man's head.

Below is an old friend of mine, Rembrandt painting himself several decades later (1650's rather than 1620's). It lives in the Frick Collection, the small palace that Henry Clay Frick had built for himself on the edge of Central Park's ritziest neighborhood. The building is a monument to polished marble and elegant spaces. If you want to see a collection of what were at the time some of the most expensive paintings in the world, this is the place.

My wife's family s at the same time lived down in the slums down on the lower East side of Manhattan. Her mother had to drop out of school at ten and a half and work in sweatshop literally so that her family could eat. I think about that jarring contrast whenever I marvel at the over the top opulence of the Frick.

Nonetheless, when money is no object and you can hire the services of an expert to select work for you, you can make a pretty spiffy collection. I used to go to the Frick to study when I was attending the Art Students League of New York. My favorite was this Rembrandt.

He used light in this one in a completely different way- bathing the whole front of the figure in a honey-infused illumination. Only a small shadow passes over the sitter's eyes, but this time he allows enough light in to show us the artist's ever so slightly raised eyebrows. Rembrandt here show us a sort of resigned acceptance. Since the earlier picture his wife and child had died and he'd seen his career take some serious nosedives.

I always found this painting offered a sort of fatherly comfort when I stood before it. It's at least life size and has a quiet emotional presence to it in person that has to be unrivaled. The light shines with a tenderly soft intensity on a few favorite places- his cheeks and nose, a scarf wrapped around his neck, and his hands. Notice how the highlighted hands are a touch oversized and are both pushed forward towards the viewer's space by the well placed darks that lie directly behind them.

Many of the Baroque era painters went hog wild with sensuous surfaces and elaborate folds in clothing their figures. Rembrandt pares that way down. The loosely described network of folds over his chest gives way to an almost completely unresolved robe covering his stomach and thighs. I think the artist here sensed he has said enough and wants gradually back out of the painting, quieting his strokes down to almost nothing by the time you reach the painting's bottom edge.

Looking for a bad Giacometti Self Portrait

2011-09-15T12:57:00.001-04:00

I'm not very nice. Just ask my cat.

The reason I'm telling you this is I was planning to write a blog post comparing self portraits- two by Rembrandt counter posed to one by the early 20th century Swiss artist Giacometti. I knew at some point I'd seen some not terribly impressive self portraits by Giacometti and went to Google Images to hunt down one I really didn't like. I knew the Rembrandts would blow the Giacometti out of the water.

That's when the trouble started- this one came up first.

It's an oil Giacometti painted of himself in 1921. Leaving aside the question I always ask of why anybody would paint wearing a suit, I had to confess I kinda liked this one. So, saving the Rembrandts for a later post, let's look at this pleasant surprise of a painting. In its cramped spaces, Giacometti manages to give us a pretty expressive painting. He'd absorbed most of the modernist impulses that happened with the various painting movements that followed on the heals of the French Impressionists- arbitrary color choices, flatter spaces, and super loose brushwork that keeps your eye aware you're looking at paint on a surface rather than at a painting that's trying to mirror reality.

Within the confines he chose to work within, I have to admit he did a fine job of it. In particular, he posed himself to make a tightly organized composition that has a nervous pulsing energy to it. Look at the silhouette of the body. There's a well orchestrated dance going on where diagonal limbs contrast against the verticals and horizontals of the architecture. While mostly leaning this way and that, Giacometti's body sometimes lines up with the geometry of the verticals (the buttoned front of his jacket or the inside seam of his left lower pant leg). And in a few places he generates some purely horizontal lines (the bottom seam of his jacket that lines up cleverly with the front edge of his chair).

Way in the background we see a big metal etching press (hope it wasn't a fifth floor walk up for whoever had to move that in). One of its arms points diagonally down and back toward the artist. See how the back of Giacometti's right thigh repeats this trajectory across the painting's surface exactly.

None of these compositional ideas were new. Rather they grew out of a centuries long tradition of painting the figure within architecture. Though a thorough going modernist, Giacometti knew the old painters had mastered a language of expressing themselves through purely visual forms. How they drew their shapes controlled how the viewers felt as they looked at the their paintings. While he was one of the innovators of 20th century painting, Giacometti knew he had to speak the visual language that painters had been building up all those preceding years.

There is an unmistakable early 20th century feel to this painting. It couldn't have been painted in 1821 instead of 1921. But it couldn't have been painted at all had the artist not grasped the visual tools that had been handed him by the legions of artists who'd gone before him. None of us artists are re-inventing the wheel. It rolls on smoothly when we find within ourselves the stories we are meant to tell. Giacometti in this painting proved a good story teller.

The Subtle Power of Gradation

2011-09-09T15:18:00.004-04:00

My daughter Louisa was joking around with me the other night. She was planning to take a bunch of her students to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and she asked which of their exhibits I would recommend. Pausing a bit she said "of course ever since I was little you and my mom have been brainwashing me that all abstract art is bad." Ribbing me, she wondered aloud if my advice should be trusted. Naturally I was bowled over by this unanticipated accusation and took awhile to pick myself up off the floor and remove the sharp arrow that had pierced my heart. Could I really be that narrow?

It is true my heart lies with the realist painters most of the time and long time readers of this blog know I talk about the Hoppers, the Rockwell Kents, the Winslow Homers, and the like way more than I do contemporary art. But my rebuttal of the charge I'm biased against abstraction (much less against current concept driven art) would of necessity be pretty short. One thing in my favor is I used to be an abstract painter in my early days. And a concluding argument I could use before the jury happened just the evening before. As I was thumbing through the latest issue of American Art Review magazine, I was stopped in my tracks by a particularly lovely oil by Lyonel Feiniger (German-American painter, 1871 - 1956). And I showed it to my equally accused wife Alice who burst out with "Hey, that's really nice!"

Why Feiniger? He's an artist who does a lot of things right that I deeply value in painting. I like strongly stated silhouettes first of all. I figure if you can design a painting that arrests the eye even when it's only at the stage of establishing flat shapes you're likely pull off an exciting painting. In the Feiniger above and below you can see his chiseling out clear and hard straight lines on his unexpected flat forms. He's very good at finding personality in just flat shapes.

The other big reason I like Feiniger more than many early 20th century American abstractionists is he held onto the wonderful tradition of the landscape wrapped in dense, swirling atmosphere. While Feiniger always shows his cubist roots, he had a natural affinity for gradating his tones. In the oil above it's pretty hard to find a surface that isn't gradated. And he delights in varying the edges of his shapes from sharp to softly indistinct. To me gradations in a painting always call up the passage of time, changing light, and shifting weather. There is an emotional tone that creeps into a painting when not everything is clearly layed out and spotlighted.

That is exactly the tool box that back in the mid 1600's Rembrandt reached for in his moody and often mist laden landscape reveries. One of my favorite is his windmill painting below.

Rembrandt has turned up the volume on his atmosphere and deep space way beyond anything Feininger wanted to try, but Rembrandt spoke Feiniger's language of finding expressive flat shapes. Look at the drama of contrasting silhouettes between the spear like doused sail in the little boat in the right foreground and the massive almost rectangular cliff where Rembrandt errects his windmill tower. Here are two forms that couldn't look less alike, but the painter cajoles them into joining together in a conversation. (Oh heck, they're doing more than that, they're singing together the most beautifully melancholy song, but to say that makes me sound obscessed by the old masters. Still one could do a lot worse).

A Friend in the Metropolitan

2011-09-04T09:56:00.003-04:00

My old friend Bob Sheridan who was one of the first people I met when I went off to college in Oberlin, Ohio emailed me a photo of the Edward Hopper oil above yesterday. When I first met Bob I was intending to major in sociology and imagined a career for myself teaching and writing learned books. Bob's staying in New York this week and went over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Back in the late '60's I spent two wonderful summers as a student at the Art Students League of New York. I used to go to the Met to study the paintings when they were open in the evenings. I was determined to learn everything I could from that giant museum.

Bob's email sent me back to those years. Bob was one of the earliest collectors of my paintings ( and incidentally owns a large oil I painted in Hopper's kitchen in his Cape Cod studio that I'm really proud of). He also bought my work back in the days when it was really affordable.

Bob's photo of the Hopper lighthouse makes me smile for several reasons. One is that it's a heck of a good painting. But also because it was one of the paintings I used to look at when I was starting out as an artist, full of energy and drive but also full of questions and uncertainty about what it took to make art great. I'd stand and look at this Hopper, squinting my eyes this way and that and wondering if I was missing anything important. Years later I see it far better because my eyes work better now- they've been educated by the thousands of drawings and paintings I've done and the countless other artists whose work I've imbibed.

Paintings are made for our pleasure. They fill the rooms of our houses and our lives and make them larger. They are companions. And they are teachers, slowly nudging our eyes to wake up and take in more of what reality really is.

There's much that could be said about Hopper's lighthouse. One is that he'd come back after painting it one day and revisit it from an altogether different point of view, as he does in the watercolor of the same lighthouse below. Just by example Hopper is telling us that we never understand something fully the first time. He came back and looked again and again, each time discovering something that had been hidden from view in his previous visit. That's a good life lesson right there.

For convenience I'll show you that first painting again to save you having to scroll up and down so much. Let's check out a few of the tricks Hopper has up his sleeve to make this painting spring to life.

First, think of some of the truly dreadful paintings of lighthouses you've seen hanging in seafood restaurants. Inevitably they show the lighthouse surrounded by lots and lots of sky. Hopper instead knew he didn't have that much to say about the sky. So in both of these paintings he zeroed in on the buildings, blowing them up in scale so they run off both the top and one of sides of his painting. Immediately he's broken they sky up into two distinct shapes instead of just one long passive background void. It's his way of forcing the otherwise passive sky to play a more active role in his drama.

In the oil just above Hopper has conceived of the buildings as a long chain of connected geometric shapes, sort of like a necklace made of impossibly large abstract beads all strung together. Such a necklace would be painful to wear but it's great to look at as it breaks up the big rectangle of Hopper's composition.

Looking further into Hopper's envisioning of the building, squint your eyes a bit and notice how he's conceived of the structure in two parts- there's the sunlit part and the shadowed part intersecting each other like a giant "X". He wants your awareness to center on these expressive big silhouettes, so other than breaking the building up with his bold shadows, he tones down all the other extraneous detail. The windows seem to be melting away into the surfaces of the white walls.

Compare these barely stated windows to the dramatic punctuation provided by Hopper's highly contrasting darks of the windows in the other watercolor lighthouse. In your mind's eye try an little experiment- imagine the watercolor with all the accents of the seven dark windows removed. As they disappear the watercolor wilts away into a too-middle-toned puddle. In that painting the windows are one of the engines that drive the painting forward.

Hopper had trained his eye to such a point that he had a sixth sense as he was working about which way to go with details like his windows. Sometimes they have to be stressed, other times he had to turn their volume way down. Like all artists who've worked and looked hard at reality and at art, Hopper had carefully nurtured his best instincts. Like a well trained athlete who just lets their body take over and perform at their peak, Hopper reach the point where his hand often made the right choices for him without his having to think about what he was doing.

Did Hopper's instincts sometimes fails him? Sure, it happened plenty. Probably most of his failures ended up disappearing into his trash can or were painted over. You will see sometimes work by the guy that's not up to his usual standards. Hey everybody stumbles.

But what we can learn from Hopper is that we can all develop our ability to see more and to sense reality more deeply. It's part of the job of being alive, to make the experience the fullest and most meaningful journey we can. Our success and our happiness depend on it.

Anyway, thanks Bob for sending the photo of lighthouse and thanks Ed for painting it.

The Art Devil is Trying to Kill Artists

2011-09-01T08:59:00.003-04:00

Philip Koch, Blue Mountain II, oil on panel, 14 x 21", 2011

I received several comments from artists who had read my response to a question Joanne Mattera had asked on her blog this week. The topic was whether artists felt like "giving up." Here's what I had said-

I've been painting actively since the late '60's. Over that time I have watched many talented and hard working artists become discouraged and gradually withdraw from actively making and showing their work. The world is a less interesting place without the artworks many of them would have created.

Over time I've come to value survival itself as a talent that is right up there along with having a genuine vision and a sharp eye.

And I have more respect than ever for any artist who is able to keep the little fire of their enthusiasm alive and keep working at their art over decades of time. Some of then are unsung, some of them don't always produce the very best work, but still to me they are quiet heroes.

Some years ago I was informally talking with the husband of one of my art dealers. Her gallery showed mostly work on paper by well known artists. He was a professor of economics and only observed his wife's gallery from a distance. We were meeting for the first time and he expressed surprise at how young I was. At the time I was closing in on forty so I was surprised at his comment. He explained the artists they saw at the gallery were either "really old" well established artists who were having their work exhibited, or as he said "kids" just out of art school trying to get his wife to consider showing their artwork. "There are no middle aged artists" he joked.

Often I've written about the Muse, the mythological figure who guides artists with her magical insights to do their best work. While I don't literally believe in her, there are often moments in the studio when I am able to paint better than I know how. In ways that I are impossible to fully grasp, I somehow access some deeper part of myself and do my most exceptional work. Being visited by The Muse is as good an explanation as any. Artists have been dreaming of her for centuries.

But if there's a myth to explain how artists achieve insights and breakthroughs, what about all the artists I've known who became discouraged and quit making art? It seemed to me only fair that we have a cosmology to explain that too. I found myself fantasizing about the other side of the creative coin. Flip it over and on the other side you'll find The Art Devil. (He probably tip toed into my imagination as a boy when someone read me the story about the evil Troll who lived under the bridge)

I can see him more clearly now- he's forty feet tall and carries a sledgehammer that he clumsily swings at any artist he can find. He's relentless- you'll find him outside the gallery of any artist whose solo show didn't sell or waiting at the cash register as the young artist tries to pay for that tube of cadmium yellow paint she needs. Fortunately his aim isn't that sharp and if you keep your eyes open you can dodge his blows if you're quick. What I can't figure out is why none of my art professors warned me about this shady figure. He's out there, and the legions of ex-artists testify to the weight of his iron hammer.

What I'll Tell My New Art Students On the First Day of Class

2011-08-27T11:24:00.007-04:00

Philip Koch, Edward Hopper's Beach, S. Truro, MA, vine charcoal, 9 x 12", 2006 I teach two classes a week at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. It's a large art school ("America's oldest continuously degree-granting College of Fine Art"). PAFA up in Philadelphia is older, but we can claim Abraham Lincoln giving his second inaugural address at MICA, which is pretty cool.

Every summer brings to an end a period of intense painting activity for me, a time when I do a lot and speak little about it to others. It's my annual "monk" period. This is good for it clears my head and allows me to think afresh about what I want to say to my students on the first day of class.

This Fall I'm teaching Life Drawing and an introductory Painting class. Both are required classes and always have a few over twenty students. I love teaching these offerings because I believe they offer perhaps the greatest potential to genuinely help young artists grow. On the first day you can't descend into all the subtleties and details. Since the students' ears are working overtime on Day 1, tell them what you feel is most important.

Philip Koch, Cape Cod Morning, oil on canvas, 36 x 54", 1990

Permanent Collection of the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art

So here are the things I'm planning to say:

1. Art is a visual experience before it is anything else. Expanding your capacity to see is our goal, so we are going to give you as many opportunities to look as possible. If you look a lot, you start to see. Those are not the same thing.

2. While there are many competing ways of working in today's art world, no one gets anywhere by barking up every tree simultaneously. Many branches of the art world have their own validity, and we are not here to deny them that. But we are going to concentrate on just a few approaches to making art so me can make the most progress in the short time we have together.

3. You have to become an expert not only on your own work, but also the progress of all your classmates. They are here so you can learn from them- how are they solving their problems? What do they routinely do well? What pot holes do they keep falling back into that you should avoid? If you
come to class and share your work, you are shouldering your responsibility of helping your fellow artists.
So you have to come to class.

4. We are going to require you to work standing up at all times. If you are standing you awaken your senses, including your eye. Artists have as much in common with dancers and athletes as we do with poets and philosphers, so we employ the whole body in our work.

5. Put your Home Studio piece up on our critique wall first thing when you enter the classroom in the morning and leave it up until the last possible moment before you leave at the end of the day. It will look different in our classroom studio than it did at home. You want as much time as possible to see what you may have overlooked. Also you want to see your work in the context of your fellow artists' pieces.

When you hang your work up, hang it with a sense of pride. There is no more important piece of art in the world for you than the one you are putting up each morning. Make sure it is level (and if it's a drawing pin it down lovingly flat with pins in at all four corners.

6. You must save all your work, both in class and the work you do outside of class for your Home Studio topics. Even if a piece is not successful (if you are trying to stretch your art wings you will fail some of the time) you have to absorb its lessons for you. A successful artist never "loses" her or his work, and you won't.

7. Entering into a creative frame of mind is difficult at best. The setting where you do make your drawings or paintings is critical to your success.

I like to talk about The Muse, the mythological figure who represents our deepest and most inventive side, and for convenience I call her a "she." The Muse has made it known through the years that she doesn't like to work surrounded by squalor. To get the Muse to come join you as you work you must keep your work space clean. After class you must clear up you work area, throw out your dirty rags, wrappers, recycle cans, etc. Remember, The Muse is watching. She is legendarily fickle. Do not annoy her or she won't help you with your art.

Philip Koch, Monhegan Dawn, Ochre, oil on panel, 6 1/2 x 13", 2011

Paul Revere's Painting Secrets

2011-08-25T15:48:00.001-04:00

Years ago whenever I used to gather 35 mm slides to show my classes at MICA from the school's Slide Library I'd fall into gazing at a big poster of this painting by Grant Wood that was hung on the Library's wall. It's of Paul Revere's famous ride to warn of the approach of British troops outside Boston. In a lot of ways it was my real introduction to Grant Wood as previously I'd only known that American Gothic double portrait that's reproduced everywhere. As I didn't really care for that famous painting, I was surprised how much I felt drawn to this narrative from American revolutionary history. What I was feeling I now realize was the expressive power of Wood's talent. He was making me want to look at his picture.

A really good painting has to first of all delight the viewer's eye with visually surprising and sensually convincing delights. It's gotta look good. Wood's painting does by employing many skillful moves. Let's talk about a few.

First, his point of view is unusual but well chosen to lay out the story. We're offered an invented bird's eye view of a rolling and undulating countryside interspersed with simple geometric shapes of the architecture. To get these two very different kinds of forms to talk to each other, Wood treats them similarly. He takes pains to gradate the tones on all of his surfaces. In fact, you have to look hard to find a surface where the light and dark isn't gradated. It's subtle but powerfully wraps the painting together.

Wood images a light source (one heck of a full moon?) that shines most brightly down on Revere's horse. See how the light gradually diminishes as you move away from the horse in any direction. How moody and mysterious the growing shadows become once you reach the inky blues of the far distance. I find one of the most critical strengths found in great paintings is the concreteness of how the painter conceived of the lighting situation. They see the light itself as one of the key actors in their painting. If you have a great story to tell in your painting, what is the optimum way to illuminate it? Painters like Wood offer us a crash course in creative lighting.

Painters always develop habits that work well for them. One of Wood's favorite devices is creating a landscape full of hills and valleys and then wrapping a prominent winding road over and around them. It is amazing how often the prominent features of a Wood painting are the sculpted masses of the earth- usually imagined as giant swelling forms that seem like sections cut out of huge spheres. Wood seems to say the earth possesses a living, moving personality. Imagine the above painting repainted to show our horseman riding across a totally flat landscape. It would be a far less intriguing painting. One other feature I love in this particular Wood is the way his winding river is made to look so much like the curving roadway.

One final thing that's critical to this painting's success is the placement of the forms of houses and the trees. There is an unconscious tendency to spread one's forms out too evenly throughout a painting. I imagine a sinister figure who I like to call The Art Devil whispering in a painters' ears as they place the houses in a painting "hey, give 'em each a little yard- spread 'em out a little." Watch a truly inexperienced painter place three imaginary trees in their painting- inevitably they'll be equally spaced apart from each other, as if to give each one the most space to grow. It's a nice sentiment, but that's a recipe for a dull painting.

Wood clusters all his houses close to each other. Then there is a relatively open space where your eye is allowed to rest, and finally as you move into the distance he gives you some fifty individual sphere-like trees, all tightly grouped together. It makes the painter seem decisive. THIS is what I mean it seems to be saying. I think what we're drawn to in a paintings is a vision that shows a sensitive hand painting for us in a very deliberate way. I get the feeling Wood is giving us not just any possible view of Paul Revere but the version he's convinced is the very best vision of this legendary ride. Wood is sensitive and intuitive, but he arrives at his best idea and tells it to us straight out without any mumbling. It's clear, crisp, to the point, and very effective.

Grant Wood and Me Down on the Farm

2011-08-22T18:35:00.006-04:00

Though I'm originally from upstate New York, I spent some six years in the Midwest starting when I was 18, first in Oberlin, Ohio and then in southern Indiana in Bloomington. And it was in the Midwest I became first a young artist and then a landscape painter. Looking back I'm amazed how much learning I managed to pack into those years. And I made great friendships there as well. So perhaps my past predisposes me to like some of the painters who sprang from the Midwest. One in particular is Grant Wood.

Farming dominates and leaves an unmistakable imprint on the people living there. Grant Wood grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and turned his sharp eye on the rhythms of planting and harvesting. He along with his Cedar Rapids compatriot, the artist Marvin Cone, turned the seemingly commonplace agrarian world into something almost mythic in their paintings. Their work has in it's own way the grandeur of the 19th century Hudson River School painters or the later nearly abstract landscapes of Georgia O'Keeffe.

I was invited to have my first solo museum exhibition in 1990 at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art in northeastern Iowa. CRMA by the way has the largest collection of both Grant Wood and Marvin Cone paintings anywhere and is well worth the visit. Recently they acquired and restored Grant Wood's nearby old painting studio so you can visit that as well.

Wood ran a summer art school in the small neighboring town of Stone City, IA. When I traveled out for the exhibition the museum people encouraged me to try it out for painting motifs as the area had proved a gold mine for sources for both Wood and Cone. I drove out there for a week of painting and found what had excited the earlier artists still very much there. Above is Wood's oil Stone City. To this day the little hamlet looks pretty much as it is in the painting. I was charmed as I remembered my 7th grade Social Studies textbook had carried a reproduction of that painting. It was one of the very first times I started really looking closely at any piece of art. Wood's unusual repeated arcing rhythms grabbed my eye- I wasn't sure at the time whether I liked them or not. Now I know I do.

Above is one of my all time favorite of Wood's oils. He's systematic as he goes about plotting the geometric pattern of his cone-like bundled stalks. I particularly love the gradations in the snow from warm highlights at the left turning slowly cooler and subtly darker as we move to the right. And the gradation in the sky from an olive brown to a dark charcoal grey at the right is nothing short of wild but it's convincing nonetheless.

Wood was also a master designer with how he selectively used patterned textures in the leaves and bundled stalks that appear almost like a busy wall paper contrasted against the smooth furrows of white snow. Imagine for a moment how much less personality would be in the painting if one removes the decorative patterns on the plants and replaces them with smooth bland surfaces.

I love the Wood painting below as well for its maze-like network on the swelling hillsides. Maybe the texture gets a touch out of hand but I forgive the artist his excess.

I just finished working back into the canvas below, my oil Stone City Barns, 24 x 48", originally from 1991. It was done in the studio from a small on-location oil I'd done on a country roadside near Stone City. As luck would have it I always preferred the way the large version turned out. It had fewer highlights and came across as a more authoritative statement. So I gingerly went back into the small oil version intending only a few changes to bring it in tune with its larger cousin. Well, as so often happens, I started getting new ideas for other improvements and ended up mostly repainting the entire surface. The small piece improved noticeably. Almost like a ping pong match, I then had to repaint the big version to come up to the new level of the small study.

I think that sort of back-and-forth conversation between small paintings and larger studio versions is almost always productive. Of course it is easier to try out new moves on a small surface. But you can't control or predict when or where insight and small breakthroughs will happen. Whenever and wherever you get a good idea, make a note of it. Insights are precious and have to be valued even when they come at unexpected and inopportune times. That's OK. Creativity isn't entirely logical, or perhaps it follows a logic we can't fully understand.

Veer Magazine Article on Unbroken Thread Exhibition at Peninsula Fine Arts Center

2011-08-18T11:30:00.001-04:00

I just received this article that appears in Veer magazine's August 2011 issue from the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. Written by Francis Ward, it captures so much of the spirit behind my paintings that I thought it would serve as a perfect blog post in itself.

Philip Koch, Otter Cove, oil on canvas, 44 x 55", 2008

VEER MAGAZINE

August 2011

ART SCENE (EXHIBITION)

SOMETHING DEEP AND TRUE

Contemporary landscapes of Koch stir the imagination at PFAC

by Fran Ward

It’s a moment of perfection! Standing in a gallery among landscapes by Philip Koch, we can slow our pace, come to a complete halt and breathe a sigh of relief. We’re here now! That’s all that matters. The art of Philip Koch has provided us a beautiful respite.

There’s more to Koch’s landscapes than meets the eye in “Unbroken Thread,” an exhibition of Philip Koch’s contemporary watercolor landscapes at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center through October 2.

Timelessness is central to Koch’s works. Each picture is a frozen vignette of Nature at its grandest simplicity. While this artist captured his vision, his artist models (sky, water, trees and hills) posed without moving. His paintings depict places where the earth is untouched and there is no trace of a specific time. There is no year. There is only forever.

The large works present an immediate awakening of all the senses. Vivid blocks of color first attract us. Upon closer glance, we see scenery, as expected. There are foregrounds and backgrounds, broad swipes of nature, color and silhouettes.

As we stand in either of the two galleries devoted solely to work from his collection, we feel a distinct impact. Singling out an individual picture, we experience its sensuous nature. For observing is an experience of the senses, not the intellect, as we witness the moment Koch recorded that particular vision of beauty.

We share his view on cold mountaintops on a clear day as we overlook land and water below. On a buggy, muggy day, we stand at still water and hear big-winged insects buzz by our ears. As day ends, we observe bands of sky hold tightly to their vivid hues until last light as the temperature drops.

They are his expressions of New England--whether on the rugged coast of Maine or in a valley in the White Mountains. He does not recreate from photographs. He creates from the imagination. Before he paints, he draws using vine charcoal--a natural substance for storing his particular memory of nature.

He attributes his art to the location, his experiences and a continuation of work that preceded his. “Koch feels that artists of the past were crucial to his maturing into a professional artist and their creativity is an ‘unbroken thread’ of which he has become an extension.”

Formerly an abstract painter, Koch discovered the work of Edward Hopper, a 20th century American artist. “The sunlight and long shadows in his work absolutely enchanted me.” Koch fell under Hopper’s spell, decided to become a realist painter, and has painted at Hopper’s studio using Hopper’s easel.

I believe another common thread is that we, the viewers, are an element of each tableau. By looking at the scenery, we become part of the art. We breathe in nature and become part of its depiction. We share an air of contentment with the art, artist and natural setting.

There comes a realization, though, that the room is not about the art, and not about the artist. It is about the majesty of Nature, its peace and tranquility.

Koch has a gift for presenting what he experienced so we can experience it, too.

He says, “When you do it right, art is clearer than reality. Every now and then you see something deep and true.”

A professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Koch hopes to be doing what he’s doing for the next 30 years. Here’s to now and 30 more years “of something deep and true!”

---------------

Unbroken Thread:

Nature Painting and the American Imagination

The Art of Philip Koch

and

The Virginia Landscape: Works on Paper

Through October 2, 2011

Peninsula Fine Arts Center

101 Museum Drive

Newport News, Virginia, 23606

pfac-va.org

757-596-8175

Georgia (O'Keeffe) on My Mind...

2011-08-16T09:36:00.008-04:00

Why do some artists become household words and others linger in obscurity?

Some months back I wrote about the intriguing but now little known American painter Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones (1885- 1968. You can read about Sparhawk-Jones on my friend Barbara Lehman Smith's website). Sadly Sparhawk-Jones' ascent in the art world was derailed for decades by her struggle with mental illness. Once considered one of the people to watch in the art world, her reputation is only now coming back out into the daylight.

The far better known Georgia O'Keeffe (1887- 1986) came to prominence a few years later than Sparhawk-Jones when O'Keeffe became romantically involved with the older wealthy American photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz was prominent in modern art circles and had the financial resources to champion her work. I've often wondered if we today would know O'Keffe's work as well had she not become entangled with the famous older photographer. Personally I think her work strong enough to have earned at least some audience for itself entirely on its own merits. But whether she'd be the superstar she is today without the Stieglitz boost we'll never know.

Best known are her close up views of flowers, but she was also a first rate landscape painter. O'Keeffe forms an intriguing bridge between modernism and the traditions of realist painting. Her paintings are fascinating teachers who helped many to see nature with new eyes.

Above is one of her long series of works done up on Stieglitz's home up at Lake George at the southern edge of the Adirondack Mountains, as is the barn painting below. Look in the top painting at the huge role played by gradation of tone and color. I love the subtle difference between the slightly warmer colored sky and the ever so slightly cooler water.

In O'Keeffe's barn painting there is a wonderfully managed collision between a natural world rendered entirely with softly undulating curved lines and the sharp and straight lines of the barn's geometry. O"Keeffe wasn't afraid to hit a harsh note to pump up the drama in her work. Look at the super high contrast in the barn's black window and its stark white frame. Test out how the painting would look without it by blocking it out from your view with your index finger. The painting becomes infinitely less powerful and energetic without it.

Below is a painting from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, NM where my friend Barbara Buhler Lynes is Curator. In a painting like this O'Keefe is taking a few hearty strides away from the colors she probably perceived when looking at the terrain around her. Color instead is chosen more for how she feels it will perform in her painting.

As different as this mountain panorama below is from the barn painting above, notice one key similarity- the white patch of snow at peak at the right. It's so like the barn window, a fresh hand clap of an accent to wake you up just when you thought you had grasped the image's meaning. It's funny as in our time most discussions of paintings tend to center on color harmonies and dissonances. O'Keeffe, thorough going a modernist as she is, was more than ready to use tonalities of darks and lights to compose the drama of her compositions. As I've said before on this blog, the enjoyment of color is a least as much about the tones hidden in the colors as it is about the choice of a particular hue.

My eye certainly has enjoyed the benefit of studying O'Keeffe's landscapes. She's one of the people who have by example encouraged me to become more playful in my own paintings with my color choices. Below is a new painting I finished just last week that displays some of those good lessons.

It's titled Edward Hopper's Studio Bedroom, oil on panel, 10 x 5", 2011. The piece actually began several years ago when I set my easel up in the kitchen of Hopper's studio in S. Truro, MA on Cape Cod. It looks from the kitchen towards the two closet doors in the Hopper's bedroom that in real life have marvelous over sized black metal doorknobs. I first did a monochrome vine charcoal version. That in turn led to a pastel drawing of the same subject done working from the charcoal. And now this oil painting that I made looking at the pastel. My guess is that O'Keeffe too had an indirect working process like this, though I haven't researched her actual painting methods.

The Wadsworth Atheneum's Edward Hoppers

2011-08-12T10:16:00.006-04:00

What's this detail?

I won a contest! Last time this happened I was about six and won five dollars for my "Space Robot" costume ( a cardboard box with pipe cleaners for antennae) in my town's annual 4th of July parade.

This time around I've won a membership to the first public art museum in the U.S., the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art up in Hartford, Connecticut.

The Atheneum has a cool history. It was built in downtown Hartford on the site of the Daniel Wadsworth family mansion with funds from that family and holding lots of their original collection. Their main building is a medieval looking castle (if you're going to be the oldest art museum why not look the part? Perhaps Susan Talbot, their Director, might consider jousting tournaments as a fund raising event). I get a kick out of older art institutions, partly because I teach at MICA (America's oldest continuously degree-granting art school. PAFA up in Philadelphia probably has the mantle of being the actual oldest school).

When an art museum starts collecting early, you tend to have a pretty impressive collection. The Atheneum for example has a world class Hudson River School collection, something near to my heart. But back to the mystery print...

The Atheneum had a clever idea to post a detail out of a work of art on their Facebook page and challenge viewers to name the piece and the artist. At the top of this post is the "clue" they provided yesterday morning. Now normal people have diverse interests and probably wouldn't have any idea. Me, I don't have that problem.

As long time readers of this blog know it was looking at Edward Hopper's work that persuaded me to switch to realist painting instead of working abstractly. Hopper spoke to me on many levels and I made a point to get to know his work well- really well. So I had an immediate suspicion this detail was taken from one of Hopper's subway car etchings.

Turned out it was Night on the El Train from 1918. Hopper worked for twenty some years full time as an illustrator, but on his own time he feverishly worked at a long series of etchings like this one. So much of what he would later do in watercolor and oils was prefigured by these black and white little gems. I took Hopper's etching work extremely seriously for I knew just as it had helped him develop the vision that would later flower in his paintings that it would help me with my work as well.

The Atheneum has a number of fabulous Hoppers, not the least of which are the following watercolors.When I had my first (of thirteen) residencies up in Hopper's Cape Cod studio starting in 1983 I made discoveries about Hopper's watercolor practice. He liked to stretch his watercolor paper not on a drawing board but over stretcher bars like the ones used for stretching canvas. Up in his attic I found just such a ready-to-go stretched piece of watercolor paper. Probably he liked using the stretcher bars because of their light weight (his watercolors tended to be fairly large and drawing boards that would have held them would have had to be big and heavy).

What delighted me was the extra attention to detail he showed. When you take have paper stretched over stretcher bars it's pretty translucent and sunlight shining on its backside will show right through the paper, throwing off your tonal judgements. So Hopper had carefully tumbtacked layers of a 1954 sports section from the New York Herald Tribune to the back of the stretchers to block out the sun. It was such a modest solution to his problem that it utterly charmed me. It felt as if he might return at any moment to start working on the piece. I left it there for him.

Here are three of the Hopper watercolors in the Atheneum's Collection.

This is Marshall's House, 14 x 20 from 1932, two years before he built his studio in S. Truro. MA. It must be one of his Cape Cod scenes. The painting has a marvelous orchestration of color. Notice the way all the yellows and ochres and held down in color intensity so that his three different brighter reds on the roof will stand out.

This might be one of the most popular of Hopper's watercolors, Captain Strout House, Portland Head, 14 x 20" from 1927. It's an absolute masterpiece. Look at the wild way Hopper has the watery blue horizon at two distinctly different levels in the painting. It should look ridiculous but instead it knits the painting together. See how if you connect the two differing water levels with a straight line, you get a diagonal angle that runs exactly parallel with the white fence railing in the foreground.

Here's Hopper's Methodist Church, Provincetown, 25 x 19 3/4" from 1930. That's eighty one years ago but you can still see exactly the same view as Hopper painted if you stroll down Commercial Street in Provincetown. While his version is an accurate bit of reporting, it isn't without some artful invention. Hopper wanted the diagonal sloping roofs to dominate the painting so he amped up the contrasts in those forms. In comparison, the edges and contrasts in the lower section of the church steeple have been softened and held back so as not to compete with the main actors he's placed in his foreground.

Here below is my own painting, Edward Hopper's Studio, oil, 14 x 21" from my first residency there in 1983.

And this is a painting I did last week based on an on-location pastel study I did in the studio. It's Edward Hopper's Easel, oil on panel, 7 1/2 x 10", 2011.