Philip Koch Paintings

Last week I traveled to Ithaca, NY to visit Cornell University's Johnson Museum of Art . Housed in a unique towering I.M. Pei designed building, the Museum is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. The Museum's Director, Stephanie Wiles, who I knew as the Director at my alma mater Oberlin College's Allen Memorial Art Museum, took up the reins a year and a half ago at the Johnson. She very graciously had offered to give me a personally guided tour of her new Museum so I jumped at the chance. Ithaca is on Cayuga Lake, the largest of New York's Finger Lakes and loomed large in my imagination. Years ago when I was living on my parents' money I used to race small sailboats all over the Finger Lakes. (The height of my youthful athletic achievement was winning the Central New York Penguin Class sailing championship one year at the Ithaca Yacht Club. Yes I will sign autographs if asked).  I've been a committed landscape painter since 1971. My visual ...

Sometimes I'm asked if I only like art from the past. Far from it. But there is a reason I so often write about work done some time ago. It's often one of the best places to pan for gold. If you go to art museums or art galleries a lot, you are guaranteed to run into some work that leaves you cold. For professional artists, the problem gets worse, and you're likely to feel driven up the wall by some things you see. Being committed to making paintings and staying at one's easel for years brings with it a deeply emotional investment. It's an occupational hazard for artists. I was at a major American art museum yesterday and saw work that made my heart leap, and things that offered me very little. Generally I think it's more productive to spend my energies talking about work I find exciting rather than running down art I think is unsuccessful, especially when those artists aren't around to defend themselves. One of the artists I love to talk about is George...

This week I was grading portfolios at MICA after returning from the opening reception for Saginaw Art Museum's   Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch exhibition in Michigan (through Feb. 19, 2012). These are intense face to face reviews with individual students. Maybe it was the fatigue from the long weekend of travel, but it struck me that I wished I could summarize all the things I've said to my students this year in just a few words. Of course the concepts behind good painting (and superior drawing) are anything but simple and need to be approached all kinds of ways. Lots of my lectures get long and pretty word heavy. I don't know how else to do it. Sometimes you want to bend the stick the other way and boil it all down to its essence. So here it is as an early holiday present, the words I wished I'd told my classes this year- Enjoy Your Eyes.  My eyes have brought me a huge share of the enjoyment I've felt in living my life, and a good portion of my und...

Philip Koch, Recollection , oil on canvas, 36 x 72", 2000 Every few years Sarah Tanguy, Curator of the Art in Embassies Program of the U.S. State Department, asks to borrow some of my paintings to hang in one of their Embassies somewhere around the world. Three more large oils just headed off for the Embassy in Guyana in South America.  I like the three selections Ambassador Brent Hardt and his wife Saskia made- they hang together beautifully as a thematic group. About  fifteen years ago my paintings began to shift away from reporting on actual places towards a more imaginative stance.  I began visualizing the earth as it might have existed long before we humans left our mark on her. In many ways this was my personal version of the theme of the "new Eden" that was a weighty symbol in 19th century American landscape from Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School on.  To the eyes of the arriving European colonists, the America's seemed a vast unspoiled wilderness. Lar...

Drove up to Philadelphia yesterday as I realized the Philadelphia Museum of Art's "George Inness in Italy" exhibit is closing next week. A serious Inness lover, I didn't want to miss it. More on that later. In another nearby gallery were some of the PMA's showpieces of 19th century American landscapes, including the above western panorama by Albert Bierstadt. He's in all the art history books. While I've always admired his patience and descriptive skills,  my favorite examples of his work are very small oil studies that are only a few inches wide. This one above must have been six feet and have taken him months cranking away in the studio to finish. To me it's one of those paintings that looks best when one stands so close to it that you can't see the entire canvas. Here's it's neighbor, a painting I've written about before on this blog, an oil by Sanford Gifford. Comparing the two is instructive and makes Gifford ...

A few years ago I attended a talk given by a leading figure at one of New York's most prominent auction houses. It was sponsored by the Baltimore Museum of Art which had asked him to come down and speak about the comtemporary art market. He had a lot of Jean Michel Basquiate paintings coming up at his next auction, so he naturally included that artist's work in his talk. When he came to the Basquiats he commented to the audience "My hedge fund managers really eat up the Basquiats." Proabably so. Basquiat was a young artist who fell in with Andy Warhol and managed for a few years to get into the headlines. Then a heroin overdose took him. Below are two paintings by earlier artists, George Inness and Caspar David Friedrich, two 19th century landscape painters. What do they have in common with Basquiat? At first glance, not much. Well, beyond all the paintings being made with paint, they share a few other traits. All three place dramatic large dark shapes against...

Many years ago when I was an undergraduate student at Oberlin College, I made a new friend friend Larry Farmer who hailed from Oklahoma. I liked him a lot, not the least for his steady stream of homespun aphorisms. One day in talking about something or other he used the phrase "still water runs deep". Though this saying is common enough, this was the first time I'd ever heard it. The mental image of a current of change running unseen just below the surface struck me as a profound mental image. Still does. Above is a painting by the artist George Inness of the Deleware Water Gap, where the Delaware River (of George Washington fame) cuts through the Appalachian Mountains. The channel has widened and deepened enough to allow the surface to calm even though thousands of gallons of water pass by every second. Inness paints a rainbow that has appeared, presumably after the downpour that replentished the water's flow. I think the painter hints that this placid river...

One of the best reasons to get out of bed in the morning is to find out what's going to happen during the rest of your day. I'm happy to report that I'm up and downing coffee right now to prepare for whatever the day has to offer. Life is rich because it surprises us. We strain to see what's coming up at us just around the bend up ahead. And always reality presents herself to us little differently than we'd imagined she would. Artists earn their keep when they take this spirit of the unexpected to heart. Above is one of my favorite paintings in the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It's by George Inness, the wonderful late 19th century American painter who hung out all over New England and then, of all places, New Jersey. Still wherever he worked, he found something unexpected to tell us. This oil would be a typical forest interior except he does something so unusual with it. One would expect to be invited to tip toe deeper and deeper into the forest a...

Philip Koch, Fall at Lake Lemon, oil on canvas, 16 x 19", 1971 Philip Koch, Birches in the Forest, oil on canvas, 20 x 30", 1985 More reminiscing as I put paintings back into my just renovated storage room in my new basement (Maya Angelou and George Clooney are rumored to be planning to attend the official dedication ceremony I'm planning for later in the week). These two paintings are both from earlier decades in my career. The first was painted during my first year in graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington. I had been doing a series of surreal landscape paintings without using any photos for reference nor any direct observation . One day one of the painting faculty at Indiana, Barry Gealt, stuck his head in the door to my studio one afternoon, looked over the work for a moment, and then amicably said "Why don't you try painting outside sometime. I think you'd really like it." Then in a flash he excused himself and disappeared down the ha...

Drove to Rockland County just north of New York City yesterday to visit family and came back home today. As we'd hit horrendous traffic driving north it wasn't hard to persuade my wife and daughter to take the indirect scenic route home this afternoon.  We headed west through New Jersey's much underrated mountain region to the Delaware Water Gap. Here the upper Delaware River cut its way through the mountains and left an amazing geologic creation for us. My wife Alice had gone to summer camp there for years as a girl and she was obviously lost in time and space as we explored the river and forests. It was fabulous. When I was just discovering 19th century American landscape painting I learned of the Water Gap through the often reproduced depiction on it by the 2nd generation Hudson River School painter George Inness.  Above is one of Inness's Water Gap oils (courtesy Art Renewal Center). Pushing on we headed through Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. Intermittent rain...