Background on Two New Paintings

-


Summer Island, oil on canvas, 20 x 30 inches, 2023

My painting Summer Island is at Somerville Manning Gallery in Greenville, DE. Funny story behind it. Originally I painted a nearby peninsula extending into the waters of a northern lake. The far shore was close by as well and was heavily forested. 

I liked the result but as I studied the painting I found the most intrigue in the wonderfully irregular rhythms of the peninsula in the foreground. Wanting to give that the star billing I painted on it further and gradually pushed the background farther and farther into the distance. Eventually the distant forests dissolved into peaceful atmospheric blues.

Finally the foreground trees seemed to ask to stand alone, so I cut the peninsula off from the shore. The remaining little island seemed happiest with it new untethered status.




 Kitchen Table, Truro Studio, oil on panel, 18 x 24 inches, 2023

Kitchen Table, Truro Studio is in the new exhibition The Mind's Eye: Turning Inward at Courthouse Gallery Fine Art in Ellsworth, ME Dec. 6 - Jan. 18, 2024. The gallery invited its artists to reflect on how the turn to our colder season can nudge our state of mind into new and more contemplative territory. Mulling the idea over I chose to re-examine a view I'd painted before when I was staying and working in the artist Edward Hopper's former studio on Cape Cod. 

The cooler weather drives us indoors. Most of us probably spend a little extra time musing at the kitchen table. An earlier painting of Hopper's kitchen I'd made was more a wide-angle view of room. This time  I wanted to celebrate the modest comfort one might find from a single wooden chair and the simple table. It's a tribute to a painter from an earlier generation whose work has been such an inspiration for my own paintings.

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