New Paintings at Isalos Fine Art in Stonington, ME

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Isalos Fine Art in Stonington, ME just received four new Philip Koch oil paintings for their summer season. The gallery is owned by Michael and Rebecca Daugherty (Rebecca is also a painter and that's her oil of the gallery above). Last summer one of the gallery's feature shows was a solo exhibition, Inside Edward Hopper's World: Paintings by Philip Koch, that focused just on my work done in Edward Hopper's former studio on Cape Cod and his boyhood home in Nyack, NY. 

Here's Michael Daugherty standing in front of some of my work in the show last summer in his gallery.




The show did well and garnered a feature article by Bob Keyes in the 8/11/13 edition of the Maine Sunday Telegram (you can read the article here).



This year we're showing my landscapes.

One of the new quartet is my Adirondack Lake: Red, oil on panel, 10 x 7 1/2", 2014. It was painted on Lake Placid, NY near where they held the Winter Olympics.




I emphasized the amazing density of the tightly packed trees one finds in the forests throughout the Northeast. As a boy I went to scout camp near Lake Placid and was surprised by its northern forests. Previously I had had no idea trees and bushes and mosses could be so tightly packed together. Their forests were dazzlingly beautiful, but maybe also a little haunted.






In another new oil, Uncharted, oil on panel, 7 1/2 x 10" I worked entirely from memory and imagination to create a winter landscape that beckons us to explore its deeper spaces. To me it's a metaphor for the allure of what lies down the future path for all of us, something intriguing but also something that sounds a note of uncertainty. One of my memories that served as yeast for this image was the heavy snows of my childhood in upstate New York in Rochester- they often meant no school and the prospect of a day exploring the deep snows with my friends.





Sonnet II, oil on panel, 6 1/2 x 13", 2014, was painted from a vine charcoal drawing I made on location last Fall on the Schoodic Peninsula. The view looks south towards the mountains on Mt. Desert Island in Maine. On the right is Cadillac Mountain, the highest point on the Atlantic Coast in the U.S. Next to the wide open horizontals of the surrounding bays it has a remarkable presence as if it was a mountain many times its size. If any mountain can be said to have a spirit, Cadillac would have to be on that list.
And my final painting was begun just a few hundred yards from Isalos Fine Art's building when I was in Stonington for the opening reception last August of my solo exhibition there. It is Isle au Haut: Morning III, oil on panel, 6 1/2 x 13", 2013. I had climbed the steep hillside in back of the art gallery to gain a vista of Stonington Harbor and in the distance the low mountains on Isle au Haut, an island on the north side of Penobscot Bay that's part of Acadia National Park.


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