My Painting as a Museum's Art Lesson

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Philip Koch, Spring Frontyard, oil on canvas, 45 x 60 inches,
1989, Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, MD


The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, MD
is running a series of art lessons for children using images of works in the Museum's permanent collection. Kellie Mele, who directs the WCMFA's Education Dept. originated what she calls the Art A Day Challenge and yesterday (by coincidence my birthday!)
built a lesson around my large painting in their collection, Spring Frontyard. Here's a link to the Challenge.




Spring Frontyard  is a major studio painting I made based on a smaller oil painted on location in my neighborhood in Baltimore.
I grew up in a new "California Modern" style home but coming across this older white house I fell into a fantasy if what it might be like to have grown up there. My childhood home was in a deep forest. I chose a point of view that similarly sandwiched the painting's white house between two dense banks of trees. 

Kellie uses Spring Frontyard to introduce children to ideas about color- how artists purposely vary its  intensity to create contrasts, the difference between warm and cool colors, and the way complementary colors play off each other. Then children are encouraged to make a drawing or painting of their own home.

Reading Kellie's description brought me back to my first color design class as a freshman at Oberlin College. In it we made a whole series of simple abstract color exercises. Elementary as they were they taught me a whole new way to see color. Most important, color was a living thing. The lessons I took away from that class have echoed through all the paintings I've made in the decades since. 

Perhaps some young artist is looking at my painting and plunging into the world of color as they make a new piece of art about where they live.


One of the galleries in the Washington County Museum of 
Fine Arts


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