Inside Edward Hopper's Truro Studio Exhibit

-
Last week I took eight small paintings up to Nyack, New York for Edward Hopper House Art Center's intimate show of my work opening this coming Saturday, March 31 through May 1, 2012. Titled Inside Edward Hopper's Truro Studio: Paintings by Philip Koch, the show features interior views of Hopper's studio on Cape Cod where I've had the honor of having 13 residencies since 1983. 

These are some of a long series of interiors I've painted while staying there. There's a reception from 5-7 p.m. on Saturday. Following at 7 I'm giving a slide talk "Three Things You Didn't Know About Edward Hopper" (suggested donation $5.). There are aspects of Hopper I feel I can shed some light on. Hope many readers of this blog can come by to the talk and/or the show.

Above is the poster my graphic designer daughter Susan made for the show- it's a view of Hopper's Truro studio early in the morning back in Sept. of 2010. On the far side of the hill is the open expanse of Cape Cod Bay.

Below is a pastel I did of Hopper's kitchen table and chairs, along with a bunch of bananas I'd bought at the store earlier in the day. I liked the way the shape of the fruit and bowl curved like the chair backs and the table top. It's a view where most of the shapes are big rectangles, so peppering the composition with some well placed curves gives a little sense of surprise. After all, a drawing with no surprises is a bad drawing.





In this pastel one of the things I'm enjoying playing with is the color of the white walls. I've been careful to add both warm cream yellow highlights to the walls and contrast them against light cool off- whites in the lighter shadows. Having a range of temperatures in each level of ones tones (highlights, middle tones, and darkest darks) is almost always a good idea. One can see Hopper doing that in all his work.

This is the kitchen.



Here's the studio looking from the dirt road that serves as Hopper's driveway. This is looking due west.



And this is the view from the end of the driveway looking up the steep hillside to the studio sitting atop the sand dune. Hopper designed the entire studio. I think there's a very Hopper-esque feeling to the way the architecture and the rolling hillside interact.



























This is a pastel I did sitting on the end of the bed in Hopper's tiny bedroom looking due west out two windows to Cape Cod Bay. This is late afternoon and the sunlight really blasts into the studio. Very lovely.



While I was preparing my slide talk for this Saturday night at Hopper House, I ran across this lovely watercolor, Village at Two Lights from up in Maine. The feeling of it reminds me so much of how Hopper's Truro studio sits on a similar gently rolling hillside and looks out to sea. I was saying before that varying the temperature in the highlights brings an energy into the painting- look at the three lightest roofs in the foreground. So often you see paintings of buildings that look mechanical but not these sheds. That Hopper fellow knew what he was doing.

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