Philip Koch Paintings

One of the mysterious truths of making art is an artist has to discover the working methods that click with their particular brand of creativity.  You have to try just about everything until you stumble upon what is going to work best for you. Above is a photo of my studio this morning. At the left is the blocked-in foundation coat of paint for my new 36 x 54 inch canvas that's based on a smaller composition I made earlier this year Beneath the Pine  (that I wrote about in the previous blog post ). It's an unusually detailed first coat of paint for me. It took many hours of staring and mixing.  At this point I am putting the new painting aside for a few days. My excuse can be I want to let it dry thoroughly before plunging back into it, which sounds all good and rational. But the real reason is more an "absence makes the heart grow fonder" phenomenon. I need to refresh my thinking and my eyes for the painting.  Leaning against my other easel o...

Once when she was little I was showing my one of my daughters how I make my big paintings by building up layer upon layer of paint until I get the colors to behave just right. She asked "why don't you just paint the right color the first time? Then you'd be done real fast." This is a detail of the 36 x 54 inch canvas I'm working on on my easel right now. It's based on the smaller oil below, Beneath the Pine,  19 x 28 inches, 2019 (at Courthouse Gallery Fine Art   in Ellsworth, ME). At this early blocking-in stage the painting has a flat look. But I'm just getting the lay of the land. Later on I'll be going back over 99% of its surface and repainting each area to give it a fine tuning. Some areas will need to be painted over 3 (or more) times to get them to behave properly. I work with oil pigments in a wet-into-wet method that's made possible by the paint's slow drying time. Sometimes two adjacent colors need to contrast e...