How to Be influenced by a Master Artist

-


Charles Burchfield, The Constant Leaf, watercolor,
1960, Burchfield Penney Art Center

What do you do as an artist when you're excited about the work of a really famous artist?  Should you start working in their style?  

Over the last two years I've been serving as the Artist in Residence at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. I've held several thousand of his drawings from their Burchfield Archives in my hands and studied them for all they're worth. One can learn so much from absorbing the methods of the best who have gone before us- but it's tricky.

detail from The Constant Leaf

Probably it's Burchfield's unusual calligraphy-like details that first catches our eye, as in the detail above. It's an idiosyncratic handwriting he injects into all his work. In the The Constant Leaf at the top the explosion of patterns in the foliage is a classic example. But a longer look at the painting I think reveals another side to Burchfield's vision- his uncanny talent at making the entire surface of his painting contribute to its expressive power.  

Burchfield's areas of heavy patterns (the foliage, tree trunk and vertical shoots in the foreground) are balanced off by an almost completely empty snow covered yard.  He wants to stimulate us but also give our eyes a place to rest. If anything should be imitated in Burchfield it is on this deeper level of composing the entire painting. It would be missing the larger point to superficially adopt his highly stylized handwriting.

For me what I want to take from Burchfield is not the eccentricities of his very personal style but his brilliance of orchestrating all the parts of his paintings to complement each other. Here's a new painting of my own- a view of a sycamore covered hillside. Like Burchfield, I most love the forest when the trees branches themselves take front and center.



Philip Koch, Late Autumn Sun, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches,
2017.

Here was a sea of highlighted white branches. All had the wonderful staccato-like rhythms so typical of those trees- too much for the eye to take in. To compensate I pushed all the distant trees into a darker reddish tone, letting the spotlight fall only on one foreground tree. To calm things down further I put in a slowly curving paved road in the foreground. 





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