Philip Koch Paintings

Yes. I teach painting at a major art college in Baltimore. We have lots of very thoughtful discussions about    what makes for a good painting. Technique, process, vision, art history all get thoroughly chewed over. But underneath it all, I always find myself hoping that my students like dogs. When I was a kid everyone in my rural neighbor hood had a dog, sometimes two. The dogs all had a heck of a good time together having informal running contests or fighting over a stick. Sure they didn't think and reason a whole lot, but they all had PhD's in knowing how to enjoy whatever was at hand. Dogs seem to live in a world of sensation. Their ability to embrace their experience wholeheartedly is remarkable, and instructive. They know they're alive and they know their experience is worth celebrating. A big part of my life as a painter revolves around going on painting excursions in New England or the Adirondack Mountains in upper New York- traveling to ...

Philip Koch,  Adirondack Lake, Late August,  oil on panel, 10 x 7 1/2", 2012 When I was a kid I had a pretty large bedroom. This was where my family set up a ping pong table. We played a lot even though none of us were particularly good. I think we all liked the sound of a good long volley more than anything else- ping, bounce, pong, bounce, ping, and on it went, a curious dance between the two paddles. I got to thinking about this as I started going back into this painting, one I'd thought I'd finished last month. It's a new painting I based on a vine charcoal drawing I did last fall up on Lake Placid in the Adirondack Mountains of northernmost New York State.  I really liked how the new oil looked but kept wondering how it might work with a lighter sky.  Not wanting  to risk the delicate balance it had achieved, I decided to paint a second version with some big variations in the sky's color. So off I went into the  new panel. From...

The experience of living can be like trying to take a drink from a fire hose- there's just too much coming at you too fast.  In the previous post I talked about using drawings to pare down the overwhelming complexity to make the sense of it. Paintings that try to encompass everything fail every time. The irony is we have to back away from a direct confrontation with nature if we're going to make landscape paintings that can ever do her justice. Making drawings is a way to do that, stripping away color and dealing just with shapes and darks and lights. It's getting down to essentials.  I'm illustrating this post with more of the series of vine charcoal drawings I did last week up in the Adirondack Mountains in northernmost New York State. I've been going there regularly for the last half dozen years and feel I get a better understanding of the potential of those mountains for making paintings with each visit.  When I was still an undergraduate art major at Obe...

Does the world really need any more landscape paintings? If by that one means more of the work where the default setting is best described as "sweet", "restful" or "softly flowing" I'd say probably not.  Reality has a sharp edge. It cuts though our outworn habits. When I'm painting I often hear the phrase "Nature has teeth"whispering in my ear. What I mean is that in finding her real beauty I'm going to discover something that comes with a jarring, a slightly unsettling surprise.  Each generation sees a little differently than the one that went before. We need somebody to look hard at the world with eyes unencumbered by outworn blinders and expectations of just the predictable, The earth has a pulsing energy that always lies just a bit hidden from our view. For me working directly from nature has become my key tool- sort of like magnetic compass- to lead me toward the best of the unexpected that's out there. I'm just back...

In many ways art is like a particularly vivid dream- it feels  so real when you fall into its grasp. Here's perhaps my favorite oil by Asher  Durand, one of the key Hudson River School painters. Usually he busied himself lovingly painting forest interiors. Sometimes his studies of trees almost feel like portrait paintings. But this one is atypical as the rocks get the starring role. He's down in the gorge painting the Ausable River in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York State. Because Durand wanted you to have a deep experience of his river he didn't just paint what he saw. Instead he had to first envision  the scene in his pictorial imagination. He had to see it in different terms than it really was. In a way he had to make a better gorge than the one nature had provided him. Now this was a really hard painting to pull off. Potentially the rocks could have all competed with each other for our attention (as they do in so many other less s...

Philip Koch, Asgaard  oil on panel, 12 x 12", 2011 Here's a new small oil I just finished painting last evening. This is one of those out-of-my-head compositions that summarize a host of memories and emotions. I used to live out in the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. They're huge, snow covered for many months, and have improbablely sharp pointed silhouettes. When I lived out there I was deeply involved in my enthusiasm for the East Coast mountains that had fascinated my favorite 19th century painters. Those eastern mountains were forested, rounder, and a little restrained. The Cascades seemed almost like a stage set or an invention from the Disney studios- I just didn't know how to deal with them back then. And there was something else too. For reasons I didn't understand then, the snow covered Cascades, beautiful as they were, left me feeling uncomfortable and lonely.  Years later I started looking more at Rockwell Kent's work, especially his wonder...

In my book nobody captures the spirit of being alive quite so well as Rockwell Kent in his work on paper. Above are two currently hanging in the Plattsburgh State Art Museum's Kent Gallery. At the top is wood engraving Godspeed of 1931 where an angel guides and protects a lonely mariner crossing the vast sea. Who wouldn't want such a gentle helping hand from the the heavens? Kent creates a beautiful contrast between the angel's angular arms and the open sweeping flow of her skirts. The figure's silhouette alone imbues the angel with life and personality. Underneath it is Pinnacle, a lithograph from 1928 where a dark silhouetted man breaks up the empty white sky. I love the little white space squeezed between the figure's right forearm and his hips. The man and the boulder share a massive yet elegant solidity. He seems to become everyman taking in the whole world. (If you click on the photo you'll get a larger version of the prints that shows much of their el...