Seeds from the Past

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Philip Koch, Late Autumn Sun, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches
2019

Here's one of my recent paintings. Just yesterday I was redoing the final varnish coat to give it the smooth and continuous skin that I love to see on a painting. I lay on the varnish very carefully using a smaller brush than I have to so I can keep the thickness I'm applying completely uniform. It takes longer doing it this way. Often it lulls me into a contemplative frame of mind.

I found myself drifting back to the first summer I took my oils outdoors to paint from the landscape. It was at the end of my first year of the MFA Painting program at Indiana University. I had spent that year experimenting with all sorts of surreal looking approaches to making paintings about "the look of the world." I had relied solely on my imagination to make them but was feeling some extra note of authenticity had been missing.

But June beckoned full force and I found myself out searching for panoramas of the southern Indiana landscape. One particular view I found was from the top of a gentle rise in the ground on the University's golf course. The deep sweep of space it offered whispered to me "You can really do something with this!" For the next four mornings in a row I was camped out with my brushes trying with all my might to nail down the feeling the of the place.



Philip Koch, North of Bloomington, oil on canvas, 16 x 24 
inches, 1971

To be honest, I was thrilled with the result. It was understated in terms of color but it seemed to happily celebrate the spreading expansiveness of the earth. It was my favorite painting from that year. Still is.

As I finished my varnishing of Late Autumn Sun I realized how much that painting from 2019 owed to the experience I had back on that June morning when I was in grad school. 

Over the years we all makes changes, and life changes us. My paintings are now larger, more broadly brushed, and certainly more colorful. But my early gratitude to be alive and be able to see is absolutely unchanged. I see the echo of those old feelings in my painting from 1971 and I have to smile.

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