Ping Pong

-
Philip Koch, Adirondack Lake, Late August, oil on panel, 10 x 7 1/2", 2012

When I was a kid I had a pretty large bedroom. This was where my family set up a ping pong table. We played a lot even though none of us were particularly good. I think we all liked the sound of a good long volley more than anything else- ping, bounce, pong, bounce, ping, and on it went, a curious dance between the two paddles.

I got to thinking about this as I started going back into this painting, one I'd thought I'd finished last month. It's a new painting I based on a vine charcoal drawing I did last fall up on Lake Placid in the Adirondack Mountains of northernmost New York State.  I really liked how the new oil looked but kept wondering how it might work with a lighter sky. 

Not wanting  to risk the delicate balance it had achieved, I decided to paint a second version with some big variations in the sky's color. So off I went into the  new panel. From the get go it seemed to have a mind of its own, plunging off into a much cooler set of colors. It worked well in this new direction so I loosened the reins and pretty much let the painting start finding its own way.




Philip Koch, Adirondack Lake, Late September, oil on panel, 10 x 7 1/2", 2012

The funny thing is some of the design features in the second panel worked so well I sheepishly re-installed them in the first painting. And the opposite, taking some little feature from the original and putting it in the second version. This went on for a few days, with me bouncing back and forth. You might think this would have left me in the end with two identical paintings. Instead each of the panels developed early on its own distinct personality. 

What an artist has to do is treat a developing painting almost as if it is a person with an emerging individuality. If you're open to it you can watch the developing ideas forming and nurture the ones that seem to genuinely help the painting. My wife's a therapist and often she's told me how her job isn't to impose her wisdom on a patient but rather help them along to figure out for themselves what's best. Painting's not so different.

What's intriguing to me is that so often I find myself benefiting from having two related but not identical versions of a painting to bounce off of as I figure out what each needs to become complete.

Here's the drawing that began all this.



Philip Koch, Adirondack Forest, vine charcoal, 12 x 9", 2011.

Actually I like painting more than ping pong. Of course I'm a much better artist that I am a ping pong athlete. But remembering those casual childhood games of ping pong provides me a better mental picture of what I do in my studio. That's a good thing.

Often I tell my students that painting isn't something one comes to understand  so much as something one experiences. I doubt many people claim they "understand" ping pong, but lots of people have played the game. Those who have surrendered themselves to the curious rhythms of the game with its distinctive movements and sounds. I think that's an attitude that would help a lot of people get a feeling for what painting is all about.

P.S. My old website Philipkoch.com unfortunately will go dark at midnight on Saturday, June 30, 2012. A new site, Philipkoch.org has been posted. Over the next few days its content and design will grow to reach the level of the old site.

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