Philip Koch Paintings

Charles Burchfield, Christmas Scene, watercolor on paper,  1951, 32 1/2 x 24", D C Moore Gallery Christmas time finds me musing on the question of gifts. Surely supurb paintings are gifts to us. And to paint them, artists have to be gifted. What do the talents of the best artists cost them? Maybe nothing. Nancy Weekly, the Burchfield Penny Art Center's Head of Collections and Charles Cary Rumsey Curator wrote on her museum's blog a few days ago. She touches on the question of whether artists need to be damaged people to accomplish something great.  "...a few days ago on December 12, "The Writer's Almanac" celebrated Gustave Flaubert's birthday (1821-1880) and among their selected biographical details and quotations, one rang out to me as appropriate for how to perceive Burchfield: Flaubert said: "Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work." There are so many people, who in my opinion, t...

Inevitably the theme of new beginnings is wrapped up in our notion of Spring. There's a famous painting by the Renaissance artist Botticelli called Primavera  of the goddess of Spring appearing out of the sea carrying garlands of flowers. Most of you know it. To those of us who live in Northern climates, this is no small thing. But for me, when the snow and ice return, I always thing back to my own personal fresh start. Way back in the Fall of 1966, after several years of feeling like I was holding my breath to get through high school, I left little Webster, NY and headed off to my Freshman year at Oberlin College in Ohio. As was the case for so many of us, high school was an awkward and sometimes difficult stage to endure. What kept me going was the thought I would one day leave home, get a fresh start, and everything would be better. That is exactly what happened.  But, and it's a big but, not in the way I expected.  I came from a long line of co...

Philip Koch, Sun in an Empty Room III,  oil on panel, 12 x 9", 2012 To anyone who tries to follow contemporary art I want to say I understand why you feel confused. If it's true that art holds a mirror up to life, isn't this pretty much to be expected? Almost everyone I know is glad to be here. But that said, they're bewildered by living much of the time. "Contemporary Art" isn't a style. It just means art that has been made today. If used properly, the term extends all the way from performance art using digital video projections to work made by artists who think everything that happened after the 19th century French painter Ingres stinks. I have two observations. There has been an explosion in the number of possible ways artists can make art. A young student at my art school in Baltimore is expected to have at least familiarity with the following: digital art, video art. performance, inst...

Sometimes you look back at your old heartthrobs. I don't have such an active relationship with them today, but here are two artists who once were a huge help to me finding my way. We have some great memories of our times together... I've often told the story about how I never intended to become an artist. There was art in my family background- my great grandfather John Wallace was a Scottish landscape painter and his work decorated our living room. My mother's dad John Capstaff was a photographer and developed the first commercially available color film (Kodachrome) back in 1915. And my dad's brother Robert Koch was an art historian who taught at Princeton for many decades (his specialty was the early 16th century painter Joachim Patinir, a transitional figure in later Renaissance painting who was known for leading the way in giving a far larger role to the landscape in his figure paintings).  But I wanted none of that, figuring I was a more "serious...

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...

Here I am two weeks ago working on a drawing on the summit of Cadillac Mountain in Maine's Acadia National Park. The wind was blowing like crazy and I was only able to set up the easel by finding a dense stand of little pines to shield me. It was COLD. We had just had a heat wave down in Maryland before we left and neither my wife nor I could bring ourselves to pack winter coats and gloves. Silly us. Often when I'm out working like this passers by will stop to watch for a minute. Especially when the weather is, ahem, challenging, as it was, they're likely to ask "why don't you take a photograph and work from that instead of freezing?" They have a point, but I've come to understand it takes even the best painters time to discover what it is they need to say with each painting. Drawing and painting from direct observation by its nature proceeds very slowly. Ours is a language of near infinite subtlety. If you stand outside and take in the space and l...

Here are three images for you. First, Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967)  Night Shadows, 1921. I love this etching for its moodiness and its unusual point of view. Hopper lived until he was almost 30 in a second story bedroom in his family's house in Nyack, NY. It had three windows that faced Broadway, one of Nyack's main streets. Every night when Hopper looked out one of these windows he saw figures just like this one casting shadows as they walked alone down the sidewalk. Hopper had the sense to feel the poetry in his immediate surroundings. And he had the talent and determination to find a way to compose his etching to make you feel so much of what he felt. There are dozens of great design ideas in this print. Let's look for a moment at just the long cast shadow of the lightpole (I'm assuming that's what it is) that first catches everyone's eye when they look at this piece. It moves in from the left and ascends diagonally across the sidewalk, moving delibe...

In Part 1 of this post I examined the center section of this Winslow Homer watercolor in detail. It ran long, so I moved my conclusion to this separate post. You can read that previous post  here . And there's a couple of other Homer paintings for you. Here's the concluding thought inspired by this terrific little watercolor- Whenever I analyse a painting like this some readers wonder if I haven't gone too far and started projecting my own ideas onto poor Winslow Homer's art. I honestly don't think so. Homer had a lot to show us. But he spoke little about his paintings. Instead he spoke to us through a visual language. He himself had "read the classics" by studying the works of the best artists who'd trod the path before him. Each of them had built upon the achievements of artists who'd gone before and each had added a few words to the common vocabulary painters use to weave their tales. ...

Chaos. You know the feeling. Lose your car keys when you're late for work and you're guaranteed to go there. I don't know if the painter Winslow Homer (American 1836 - 1910) ever rode in an automobile, much less if early cars even had keys. But there is no doubt Homer was a sensitive guy- just look at his paintings. My guess is he had his share of mornings when everything was at loose ends. We have visual art (or music, or dance) because it helps us out of our personal swamps of confusion, alienation, fragmentation. I just ran across this Winslow Homer watercolor. It's a gem. Really good paintings have a remarkable ability to stir us up, excite us a little bit, but also to somehow lay a gentle calming hand on us. Looking at a piece like this Homer painting energizes and relaxes me. And there are  no bad side effects. At first glance Homer's showing us a pretty ordinary garden. Maybe it's his backyard. Homer's eye could look at a seemi...

Here's one of the works that will be in Edward Hopper House Art Center's upcoming exhibit Inside Edward Hopper's Studio: Works by Philip Koch. It's Easel and Open Door, Edward Hopper's Truro Studio, oil on panel, 7 1/2 x 10", 2012. It was begun several years ago up in Hopper's studio on Cape Cod and I made some important adjustments to it just in the last few days. Below is myvine charcoal done standing in a slightly different spot in Hopper's painting room, Easel, Edward Hopper's Studio,  10 x 12 1/2" from 2002. And below is a photo taken standing in almost the same spot just as the first rays of the day's sunlight pierced the studio.  A few of my other drawings I was working on at the time leaning against some of the furniture. And here's a photo I've shown before of his bedroom at left and the door leading out from Hopper's painting room to Cape Cod Bay.  One of the things I find so fascinat...

Philip Koch, Adirondack Charcoal #2,  vine charcoal, 7 x 14", 2011 A drawing by Sol LeWitt Navigating today's art world can be dizzying. Nobody's got a compass. Above are two examples of contemporary drawing. The first is my own, Adirondack Charcoal #2, vine charcoal, 7 x 14", 2011 that I made up on location in Lake Placid, NY last fall. The second is by Sol LeWitt, American, 1928 - 2007, a prominent conceptual and minimal artist. I paired the two to show how far apart the outer boundaries have been set. Last week I received an email from an art historian, Veronica Roberts, who's writing the catalogue raisonne on LeWitt. She's trying to track down information on a LeWitt drawing that was "made" by two students at my old school, Oberlin College in 1970. LeWitt is labeled conceptual because he was playing around with our notions of what we expect drawing to be. I think his intent was to "do the art part" well before his drawings made i...