Warmth of Art in a Cold Troubling Time

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Philip Koch, Edward Hopper's Parlor, Nyack,
oil on canvas, 32 x 24 inches, 2020 (at
Somerville Manning Gallery, Greenville, DE)

You know things are bad right now. 

Something I've learned from decades of making art is as I develop my painting somewhere I'm going to hit a roadblock.  
It's not fun to have to let go of your plans. But I try out some alternative solutions. Pretty soon something works.

In our personal lives having difficulty hit you over the head can hurt. If you don't let that pain blind you often that sharp collision scatters a few sparks of opportunity.  With your normal routine upended you have a chance to look at things with fresh eyes.

Here are two of my paintings. At first they look unrelated. The interior above is an oil of the artist Edward Hopper's boyhood home. The living room has heavy wooden planks for floorboards that were layed down in the 19th century. They show they've been scuffed and gouged over the years but were built to last. They're the picture of solidity and unchanging permanence.

Yet they've been polished and pull in the ever changing sunlight  that dances on Hopper's porch. Reflected on the darker tones of the varnished boards the light is deepened but somehow grows more remarkable and mysteriously important.




Philip Koch, Yellow Arcadia II, oil on panel, 18 x 24 inches,
2009 (at Somervile Manning Gallery, Greenville, DE).


Like the Hopper's Parlor painting, Yellow Arcadia puts a closed-in space of a mountain pond next to a vista of wide open seas. As rainwater runs down the mountain's granite shoulders it collects to form this intimate foreground pond. The water's calm surface color suggests stillness and rest. 

But water is so used to inevitable change. Eventually the pond overflows its bounds and streams down and out to the sea. Like the water we have to be ready for change. Like the water we're all moving to some new place we can only glimpse. And in that unexpected new place things almost always turn out alright.

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