Philip Koch Paintings

The art museum in Rochester, NY, the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG), just purchased two of my vine charcoal drawings for its Permanent Collection. This brings full circle my years as an artist. In the fourth grade I was taken on a school trip to MAG. It was the first museum I had visited. And though I didn't know it at the time, it had a profound impact on me. Above is my drawing Monhegan Dawn , 7 x 14", 2006, one of the new acquisitions. It was drawn from life on Monhegan Island in Maine early, as the title suggests, one morning. The view is of Manana Island, essentially one huge dome shaped rock that shelters the tiny Monhegan harbor from the open sea.  I grew up just outside Rochester on the shore of Lake Ontario. One of my favorite things to do was studying the Lake. While it was often very rough, I loved the times were when the lake calmed and the breezes blew out from the shore over the water. It's surface would take on the look of a shifting abstract painting. My par...

In a real operating room I'd faint at the first incision. Yet isn't there a fascination at the notion of plunging beneath the surface to grasp things by their bones and move things around to make them work right. Painters are partly just squeemish surgeons. Like them we want to grab a scalpel  and get to work, we just don't do so well with real blood. I like operating on little paintings, especially when doing exploratory work. You make changes quicky, can graft limbs back on if amputations don't work out so well, and families of your patients who die on the table never coming after you with pesky malpratice suits. I love painting large canvases, but it's my work on "little patients" that teaches me how to master the big ones. Above is a plein air vine charcoal drawing I did on Deer Isle in Maine two summers ago. I was drawn to the contrast of the light early summer greens of the foreground peninsula contrasting the heavy darks of pines on the second pro...