Welcome Home

-


This is my studio this morning.

Late yesterday the four heavy wooden crates came home carrying my paintings from my national traveling exhibition Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch. These same crates carried the show out to Washington State to the Clylmer Museum of Art in Ellensburg early this year and then traveled to Indiana for the Midwest Museum of American Art's installment of the show this June. They'll be staying home until next summer when they'll take the show down to a beautiful non-collecting art museum, the Peninsula Fine Art Center in Newport News, Virginia.


My wife Alice and I drove down to see the museum and talk with it's Curator, Michael Preble, last May. We liked what we found very much and are excited to show there next summer.

I learned long ago that sending one's art out of town was both a lot of work and totally worth the effort. Art is first of all a communication. Art isn't just the airing of someone's idiosyncrasies. It uses the visual language to move the emotions of the viewer. The artist is reaching out from the confines his or her studio to affect someone else who may be at a great distance, or even from a different time.

Here I am below standing last weekend with the amazingly soulful self portrait by Rembrandt in the National Gallery of Art. It has traveled thousands of miles since it was painted long ago. Thought I don't know the history of this particular painting, you can bet Rembrandt built a lot of sturdy wooden crates and packed them lovingly in his day. He was proud of what he'd accomplished and was eager to share it with the world.




Having an exhibition at a museum or gallery is in a way the artist's gift to the world. But in return it gives something back to the artist. There is nothing like seeing the paintings you've labored on for months in the privacy of your studio hanging in somebody else's space. Your painting just look different. One of the great challenges for a painter is to hold onto your objectivity as you work the long hours it takes to make your paintings achieve the look you're after. This is almost impossible to do.

Every artist has a bag full of tricks to help themselves see with a fresh eye. My personal arsenal includes looking at the paintings upside down, studying them in a mirror, viewing them under very low light, including almost absolute darkness, and finally looking at tiny images of them on my computer monitor. When I'm really stuck I ask my wife for advice.

I had my very first exhibition my senior year at Oberlin College. I was amazed how much I learned about my work seeing it hung up in the corridor of the school's student union- both things I liked and flaws in the paintings I was eager to correct once the show came down. The same thing happened at my final MFA Thesis exhibition at the Indiana University Art Museum in 1972.

Since then I've made a point of getting my work out of the studio as much as I can. Having shows has taught me more about where I need to go next with my art than any other single thing I do. Painting is hard work and safely shipping your work great distances is hard too. Rembrandt didn't shrink from that task. Neither can we.


Popular posts from this blog

Edward Hopper- Looking Out

-
Image
Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Morning,   oil on canvas, 1950,  Smithsonian American Art Museum Above is a painting I've loved for some forty years. I'm fortunate to be able to see it often as it lives in the SAAM in Washington, D.C. . This painting contains a real clue to Hopper's art. I visit there often as it helps me learn how to see better. Often writers will talk about the loneliness of Hopper's paintings or how his figures feel isolated and rarely interact with one another. While there is some of that in Hopper's painting, it begs a question- why is Hopper's art so widely loved? I'd offer a couple of answers. First, he's one of the most talented painters and was able to invent visual equivalents for strong emotions we humans experience as we live our lives.  He saw color combining in unexpected ways and offered up generous servings of the most delicious color combinations. Yum. Usually, as in the SAAM's Cape Cod Morning above, when he paints
Read more

Ever Wonder What's in the Next Room in Hopper's Rooms by the Sea?

-
Image
Edward Hopper, Rooms by the Sea , oil on canvas, 1951, Yale University Art Gallery One of Edward Hopper's best known paintings is Rooms by the Sea that was based on his studio in Truro, MA. Its mysterious doorway leading to the ocean captivates our eye.  Did you ever wonder what the room through the painting's other doorway looked like? Last week a collector asked to see some of the drawings I made during my residencies in the historic studio so I photographed this drawing. Philip Koch,  Edward Hopper's Truro Bedroom: Afternoon  Sunlight , vine charcoal, 9 x 12 inches, 2012. To make the drawing I set up my French easel in the bedroom Hopper shared with his wife Jo for the three decades they lived in the studio. One of the room's two small closets centers the drawing. At the right is the doorway leading into Hopper's big painting room with his studio easel in the distance.  What inspired me to make the drawing were the intense patterns the afternoon sunlight made ove
Read more

Edward Hopper's Poetry of Empty Rooms

-
Image
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 h
Read more