Allen Art Museum, Frank Stella and the Great Tree of Art

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Frank Stella, Chocurua, acrylic on canvas,
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Working in my studio this morning on a new large canvas that's based on the small oil painting below, I was blocking in the main shapes. This is the stage before I start adding any details. Three major trees dominate the composition. Bringing out a different personality for each one calls for rearranging the patterns of their branches. As the new painting is much larger some additional invention is needed.

                                                         

Philip Koch, Uncharted, oil on panel, 7 1/2 x 10 inches, 2015




Detail from Philip Koch's in-progress 36 x 48 inch canvas


As I worked my mind drifted back to my earliest days as a painter studying at Oberlin College in the late 1960's. At the time I was enraptured by the exuberance of the sharply contrasting flat shapes used by the artist Frank Stella. They inspired my first paintings.  Looking back Stella cemented the idea of how expressive simple flat silhouettes can be. To this day that memory guides me as I begin each painting.



Above and below:
Detail from in-progress Koch painting 





Oberlin College's Art Department was attached to Allen Memorial Art Museum and I'd walk through its galleries to reach my painting studio. Allen has a remarkable collection- Frank Stella's voice hung near a masterpiece by the Baroque painter Rubens. I could hear them softly whispering to me to come and drink in the pleasures and the lessons they had for me.



Frank Stella, Agbatana III, acrylic on canvas, 1968
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH

My personal journey as a painter has taken me from early color oriented abstractions, surreal explorations and eventually to a decades long infatuation with realist landscape painting. At each step along the way I picked up important lessons.

 When I was a kid growing up in my neighborhood there was one tree that had branches that were perfectly spaced to allow even the smaller of us to climb all the way to the top- a heady experience for an 8 year old. All us kids just called it "the climbing tree" and agreed it was the best tree around.

 I have a persistent fantasy about the contemporary art world- that it stands as a huge tree with branches extending out in all directions. Each branch is sustained by the atmosphere and sunlight, sending that energy on to the tree's central trunk.

 On one limb stand artists like Frank Stella, and next to them is a branch with cubist artists like Picasso and Braque who would later inspire Stella. Off on other branches are minimalists, video artists, and concept-driven people. And on a branch of our own are the realist painters like me. Together we're all finding our place on what I like to call the Great Tree of Art. 

 Happy climbing!

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