Philip Koch Paintings

Edward Hopper, Summertime , oil on canvas, 1943, Delaware Art Museum I was in Wilmington, DE today dropping off a new painting at Somerville Manning Gallery . Before heading home I stopped by the Delaware Art Museum . I always resolve not to focus on old favorites at the museum, but my feet had other ideas and planted me in front of Edward Hopper's Summertime .  Famously awkward around others, Hopper taught very little during his life and commented he didn't like doing it. But he painted on a level brimming with his distinctive creative way of seeing. His paintings teach our eyes. Some time ago in a blogpost I talked about how Hopper did great inventive things with shapes on this canvas.  I noted this today and was about leave when I saw something I hadn't noticed before in the woman's legs. The left one is way more cool in color than the right (in person this shows much better than in my lowly iPhone photograph). Hopper went to gre...

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...

Edward Hopper (1882-1967), New York, New Haven, and Hartford,  oil on canvas, 1931, Indianapolis Museum of Art The other week I flew out to Indianapolis on my way to Terre Haute to judge the Swope Art Museum 's annual 5 state regional juried exhibition. I paid a visit to the impressive Indianapolis Museum of Art . Wanted to single out one painting in their collection, Edward Hopper's oil New York, New Haven, and Hartford.  In person the subtlety of Hopper's color mixing is exquisite. My photographs don't come near doing the painting justice. But in these detail shots just above and below Hopper's grasp of how to instill personality into a painting is clear. He depicts a broad-shouldered hillside. Yet against that he conjures up these wildly shaped spindly trees. Their irregular rhythms contrast tellingly against the solemn massiveness of the hillside.   Hopper's trees live perhaps a more syncopated life than the stately ground ...

Delaware Art Museum (DAM) in Wilmington, DE is organizing the first large scale exhibition in some years of the paintings of the famous Ashcan School artist John Sloan (Am. 1871-1951). The DAM has the larges collection of the artist's work and a significant Sloan archive.  Here's a large detail of one of the paintings the exhibition's Curator, Heather Campbell Coyle, is planning to include in the  show- Blonde Nude with Orange, Blue Couch  painted around 1917. I think it's one of Sloan's best examples of what he could do with color. He knew how to use it to enliven one of the most difficult subjects to paint- skin. Look at the shadows in the detail below. Determined to avoid monotony of color, Sloan carefully painted the shadows on the buttock and on the bottom knee with relatively cooler colors. Contrasting them, the woman's upper knee slides toward a warmer orange as our eye moves into that shadow. It works beautifully. Here's another...