Philip Koch Paintings

Françoise Barnes, Misumena Ellipsoides , quilted cotton blend, silk, and polyester batting, 1988, Delaware Art Museum I was at Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington last Thursday. I've had a personal rule when visiting a museum that I have to look at the older art first. The whole drive up from Baltimore was through a punishing driving rain. Maybe some brashly colorful art would shake that chill out of my bones. So breaking with tradition my first stop was the contemporary gallery. I saw that Contemporary Curator Margaret Winslow had rearranged the gallery since my last visit, which makes everything look fresh.  What caught my eye was  the fabric wall hanging above. Though I'm known as a landscape painter, my first years as an artist I worked abstractly and still have a fondness for bold abstracted forms. This ambitious piece by Francoise Barnes was visually rich and elegant. She overlapped a network of bright colored shapes on a background of subtle gra...

Drawing is seeing.   I don't know who said that, but it is something I find myself saying all the time.  One of the joys of the two and a half years I spent as the Burchfield Penney Art Center's Artist is Residence was my discovery of how much the painter Charles Burchfield apparently  agreed with me. Burchfield drew seemingly all the time. When the museum first proposed holding an exhibition of my work from the Residency they suggested I could curate into my exhibit drawings I selected from their Burchfield Archives. I think my response at the time was a dignified "I'd love to" but on the inside it was " Holy Cow!!!" I feel deeply honored to have my work displayed side-by-side with this American master Burchfield's drawing of a house and trees at left; at right my  drawing of Burchfield's boyhood home that I made on a trip to Salem, Ohio. Below is a better view of the Burchfield. There...

My wife Alice and I went down to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. yesterday. Alice always wants to be sure to visit here favorite painting by Vermeer of a woman weighing pearls. Love the way the diagonal that runs through the painting is echoed by the angle of Alice's hair falling over her shoulder. It seems to link her to the careful balancing of the scales going on in the painting.  19th century artists took delight in studying the sky as in the  above landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. There are hardly any works by this mysterious German romantic in the U.S. I love the way the sky seems to come down and wrap its cool light around the distant mountain. Speaking of light from the sky, here's a Sanford Gifford oil where the sun struggles to burn through a silvery haze. It's a painting where the main story is the land's pinks and oranges elegantly dancing with the cool gray colors of the atmosphere.  Gifford's pai...