Philip Koch Paintings

Winslow Homer, Weatherbeaten , oil on canvas, 1894 Portland Museum of Art, Maine I was traveling in the last month. First to Portland, Maine where I attended Greenhut Galleries opening for their exhibition Maine: The Painted State that included one of my paintings. Also visited the Portland Museum of Art and soaked up one of their hallmark Winslow Homer oils, Weatherbeaten. It was painted just south of the Museum in Prouts Neck. Nobody painted surf crashing on rocks with the power and authority Homer achieved. Notice the deliberate way Homer painted his rocks. Ignoring details he paid special attention to their color. In the detail above we see how he marches our eye back into space with alternative bands of warm and cool. His closest rocks are reddish, a cooler gray on the next rocks farther back, followed by a warm dark colored finger of rock. Finally we reach the silvery cool green-grays of the surf. And Homer was something...

Charles Burchfield, Chestnut Trees, ink wash drawing, 1920 Cleveland Museum of Art Sharing a few more highlights from Cleveland Museum of Art 's just concluded exhibition Charles Burchfield: The Ohio Landscapes 1915-1920 (Part 1 of my appreciation of the show is available here  ). Two of my personal favorites were these two ink wash drawings (above and below). One of the things that excites me about Burchfield's work is how he can suggest the feeling of full color when he in reality he often limited himself to just yellows and grays. In these monochrome wash drawings we see the expressiveness of just resonant tones of dark and light. Charles Burchfield, Apple Orchard,  ink wash drawing, 1920 Cleveland Museum of Art Artists have the job of noticing things of importance others have overlooked and calling people back to take a second look. We've all seen dandelion seeds blown by the wind. Yet I don't think any other ...

It was Charles Burchfield's small Ohio hometown of Salem that first propelled his leap into his vivid fantasy world we know from his paintings. I've long felt a kinship with Burchfield.  I made the decision to become a painter while studying at Oberlin College, only a few miles from Burchfield's Salem. Like him I (briefly) attended the Cleveland Institute of Art (Cleveland School of Art in his day) and frequently visited the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art that he knew well. I flew to Cleveland to catch the exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA)    Charles Burchfield: The Ohio Landscapes 1915-1920 shortly before it closed in early May. Organized by Britany Salsbury, one of the new curators at the Museum, the show draws both on the CMA's collection and loaned works from the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo.  Charles Burchfield, Church Bells Ringing,  Rainy Winter Night, watercolor, ...

This morning I was sorting through files of my early paintings and came across this one. Philip Koch, Edward Hopper’s Studio, S. Truro, MA,  oil on paper mounted on panel, 5 ½ x 9 inches, 1997 Sometimes it’s art that reminds us of the relentlessness of change. I first started staying and working in Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod studio in 1983.  By 1997 I noticed that the wide open views from the studio that I so loved when I first stayed there were becoming obscured as the surrounding trees were growing taller. In my mind the studio standing alone high on its sand dune had been the very picture of timelessness. But clearly it wasn’t. Wanting to pin down how the studio had once seemed I did this painting above of how the studio had appeared the first time I saw it. Edward Hopper, Hills, South Truro, oil on canvas, 1930 Cleveland Museum of Art Hopper spent his first his first summer on Cape Cod in 1930, renting a house in...