Philip Koch Paintings

Philip Koch,  North of Bloomington, oil on canvas, 16 x 24 inches 1971 Sometimes art museums can make all the difference. That happened to me in the summer of 1971. I was ending the first year of my MFA Painting program at Indiana University. By making lots of paintings I was growing as an artist. I also felt drawn to  the University's art museum (now called the Eskenazi Museum of Art ) and spent considerable time studying its Permanent Collection.  There were two paintings in particular that jolted me into seeing and thinking about painting differently.  Both were seemingly quiet landscapes by Hudson River School painters that had only just entered the Museum's collection.  Jasper Cropsey,  American Harvesting,  oil on canvas, 1851 Eskenazi Museum of Art, Bloomington, IN My earlier years as a beginning painter consisted of me applying flat abstract shapes of color to a surface.  Seeing depth as part o...

 John Robert Cozens, Sepulchral Remains in the Campagna near  Rome,  watercolor, ca. 1782-83, Eskenazi Museum of Art. Bloomington, IN About a thousand years ago (actually 1970) I moved to Bloomington, IN to enter Indiana University's MFA Program in Painting. As I had previously been one of only a few art students in the small art department at Oberlin College I was hungry to finally be surrounded by other committed artists. The experience at Indiana worked out well- better than I'd expected.  More than for most of the other painting grad students, the campus art museum (now the Eskenazi Museum of Art) really spoke to me. I ended up taking a history of landscape painting course from one of the art history faculty, Louis Hawes. He had an almost fanatical enthusiasm for two early British watercolor painters, Cozens and Girtin that intrigued and delighted me.  Thomas Girtin, Landscape with House , watercolor, c...