Philip Koch Paintings

Think of late afternoon sunlight and I immediately think Edward Hopper.  Years ago it was seeing the poetry in his long shadows that convinced me I had to change from painting my early abstractions. I wanted a world with the dazzle of bright highlights and deep luminous shadows. Edward Hopper's oil painting  The Camel's Hump  (image courtesy Art Renewal Center) features a distinctive pyramid-like sand dune that for decades was a landmark in S. Truro on the shore Cape Cod Bay. The road in the foreground is the driveway to Hopper's studio and he positioned himself to look south towards the memorable dune. When I was first invited to go and stay in Hopper's studio way back in 1983 I was eager to try a painting from this same vantage point. I got there and guess what- no Camel's Hump.  The owners of the studio later told me about what had happened. Apparently someone bought the adjoining land and planned to build a house right where the Camel's Hump stood. He even h...

I was talking with Ekaterina, the lifeguard at the pool yesterday. Don't know how we got on the topic but she said as far as she was concerned "the past is the past- I'm done with it." Now she's maybe 20 or 21. Me I don't have this problem. The past, the present, what's up around the bend- it's all mixed up in my head like I'm swimming through a bowl of thick soup. The above painting is a case in point.  I grew up on the shore of Lake Ontario just outside Rochester, NY. Especially in the winter it was magical. My childhood friend Bob Wetmore used to keep his little Sunfish sailboat in a creek that flowed north and emptied out into Lake Ontario. For some reason that memory of this protected little creek always stuck in my mind- perhaps I was touched by its seeming safety compared to the wide open and often wildly rough Lake Ontario. Got a notion in my head to do a painting about winter a few years ago and started scribbling thumbnails in my sketchbo...

There is a field outside one of the ATM's I sometimes  use. Every time I go there my eye is caught and held by a stand of tall pines in the distance. Often they sway gently as they are raked by the wind. This went on for years until I took the hint and did a drawing of the place. Above is Harp of the Winds , vine charcoal and pastel, 9 x 9". Making the drawing felt right, as if I'd pulled the trees to myself and made them my own. Not surprisingly, this group of trees ended up completing the foreground of one of my large studio oils not too much later.  One would think in painting that inventing trees out of one's imagination shouldn't be that hard. Just try it. Likely as not one ends up with foliage that looks more like wilted broccoli than oaks or pines. Making drawings is it a way to engage more of your mind in grasping the essentials in what you've discovered out there in the world. It is a way to wake oneself up enough to really  see.   Is drawing better th...

The Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, MA is hosting the national touring exhibition of my work Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch through August 16th in its largest and beautifully skylit gallery space. The Museum has done a beautiful job with the exhibition. The show reveals the on-going link between the American landscape painting tradition and the paintings of this modernist-influenced artist. It is particularly appropriate that the show appear on Cape Cod as in many  ways this was where I became a mature painter. It think it was in struggling to paint the strange colors of its white sand and stubby pine forests that I came into my own. Years before in 1970 as I was entering my graduate painting program at Indiana University I was painting like an over-eager young dog chasing every squirrel at the same time. I had only recently stopped painting abstract imitations of Mark Rothko and Frank Stella's work. My discovering Edward Hopper's paintings in art books had put some ...

Drove to Rockland County just north of New York City yesterday to visit family and came back home today. As we'd hit horrendous traffic driving north it wasn't hard to persuade my wife and daughter to take the indirect scenic route home this afternoon.  We headed west through New Jersey's much underrated mountain region to the Delaware Water Gap. Here the upper Delaware River cut its way through the mountains and left an amazing geologic creation for us. My wife Alice had gone to summer camp there for years as a girl and she was obviously lost in time and space as we explored the river and forests. It was fabulous. When I was just discovering 19th century American landscape painting I learned of the Water Gap through the often reproduced depiction on it by the 2nd generation Hudson River School painter George Inness.  Above is one of Inness's Water Gap oils (courtesy Art Renewal Center). Pushing on we headed through Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. Intermittent rain...

In the last post I mentioned staying and working in Edward Hopper's painting studio on Cape Cod. Above is an 8 x 10" oil on panel I did last October in his studio's painting room. The easel shown is the one Hopper used for decades to paint many of his most famous oils. Pictured below is Rooms by the Sea, now in the Yale University Art Gallery, which is one of my favorite Hopper's. It is exactly the viewpoint Hopper would have had when he sat down to paint his studio doorway opening out to Cape Cod Bay. But he made one big change- moving the sun north so it shone directly onto the door itself. It's an invention on his part that makes the painting happen. Hopper set a great example in his openness to his surroundings. In looking at the ordinary corner and door way he felt subtle stirrings in his heart and found a way to translate them into shape and color. He evoked similar feelings in countless viewers of his painting. This is a man who never accepted a pat answer o...

When I started out as a painter I was at tiny Oberlin College in Ohio. All the art students there worked abstractly so I followed suit. But in their art library I stumbled across the work of Edward Hopper, so different than the simple geometric abstractions I was doing in painting class. Something about Hopper's bright lights and long shadows struck a deep chord in me and I realized I had to change direction and head off into realist painting. Funny thing happened. 15 years later I had a solo show on Cape Cod at a small art gallery. At that time one could clearly see the influence of Hopper's work in my paintings. The family that owned Hopper's studio bought a couple paintings and invited me to come visit them in the studio Hopper lived in for 30 years in S. Truro on the Cape. One thing led to another and I ended up staying and working in Hopper's old studio every other year since 1983.  At the top is a photo of me painting outside Hopper's studio along about '9...

Here's one of my newest oil paintings. It is titled The Sea and it's small, 6 1/2 x 13". Working at that size allows for lots of playful experimentation. Even so, I worked on it for months. The origin is a plein air vine charcoal drawing I did four years ago of the Porcupine Islands up on Mt. Desert Island in Acadia National Park in Maine (see post below). That drawing got put away for a couple of years- long enough for my original impression of the place to fade. Once I unearthed the drawing again a few years later, my imagination saw it in a different light. What had been Maine islands recalled to me my childhood in upstate New York where I spent huge chunks of time gazing at the then to me ocean-like Lake Ontario. Children often are the closest of us to the art spirit. Carl Jung thought so. And now in my sixties, I find reconsidering my on-the-spot drawings through the remembered eye of my childhood can chart the best road forward. As the oil progressed, some of the spe...

Why do we look at art?  Maybe to see what's possible. Painters take extremely simple ingredients (often literally colored mud and some oil) and turn them into something that has never existed before. Something from nothing almost.  When one is struck by a powerful painting this something-out-of-nothing quality is there in the back of their mind. It is a reminder that genuine invention, rebirth, discovery, and so on are real possibilities in our lives.  No wonder I go back to look in museum's so often. My wife is a psychotherapist who has spent years in the trenches. She specializes in group therapy and has patients from all walks of life. Almost all have had recent suicide attempts. What strikes her most is how much alike all of us are, patient and non-patient. I've asked her many times what she considers most important in therapy and her answer always the same: hope. The feeling I get from viewing a really good painting is a quiet surge of energy that seems to flow out fro...