Philip Koch Paintings

 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...

Sometimes you look back at your old heartthrobs. I don't have such an active relationship with them today, but here are two artists who once were a huge help to me finding my way. We have some great memories of our times together... I've often told the story about how I never intended to become an artist. There was art in my family background- my great grandfather John Wallace was a Scottish landscape painter and his work decorated our living room. My mother's dad John Capstaff was a photographer and developed the first commercially available color film (Kodachrome) back in 1915. And my dad's brother Robert Koch was an art historian who taught at Princeton for many decades (his specialty was the early 16th century painter Joachim Patinir, a transitional figure in later Renaissance painting who was known for leading the way in giving a far larger role to the landscape in his figure paintings).  But I wanted none of that, figuring I was a more "serious...

I received an intriguing comment on my last blog post, Edward Hopper's Women, from a reader wondering how much Hopper chose his style of painting? Mulling over how to answer I found myself thinking about Emily Campbell, the graduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art who's been helping me teach my Life Drawing and Painting 1 classes. Above and below are some of the pieces Emily unveiled in her MFA Thesis show last Friday. In the oil above a little house seems to fall to pieces as it flies up over a forest. It's the sort of image one could easily encounter in a dream. How Emily came up with it I'm not sure, but I know she has a collection of little dolls and toys that likely set her mind to weaving this tale for us. I like the painting quite a bit, largely for her unexpected and quirky details in the background. The foliage isn't naturalistic, rather it's giving us a particular gestural rhythm not unlike the patterns you'd see in a child's...

Here are some paintings from the Midwest Museum of American Art's Permanent Collection that were on display in the galleries adjoining their display of my own exhibition Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch. Above is an oil by John Elwood Bundy (1853-1933) that the museum lists as Untitled (Indiana Landscape). I was drawn to it as it reminds me so much of the landscape I used to paint out around Bloomington and Nashville, Indiana when I was first venturing outside to paint as a grad student at Indiana University. Bundy probably did this one mostly outdoors too. He deftly focuses our attention on some trees far more than others by limiting his use of strong darks to only a few places in the painting. As it's mostly done in subtle umbers and yellows, this heightened sensitivity to tonalities is critical for the warm glowing atmosphere that ties the painting together. Bundy moved to the small city of Richmond, Indiana and taught at Earlham College's Art Department. He pain...

Philip Koch, Looking South, oil on canvas, 18 x 36", 2006 Something that used to be a staple of American painting, the vast landscape panorama, had its heyday back in the mid 19th century. At that time the subject attracted the finest talents to mastering its challenge. Then fashions changed and more closed in views, where the far distance is reachable, came to predominate. Actually I love both kinds of landscape painting. But if I had to choose (sort of a S ophie's Choice nightmare for painters) I'd have to say my heart is with the deep spaced paintings. It's not a rational choice, its more about where do I feel most deeply at home. One of the highest purposes of being an artist is the task of noticing what's commonly going unnoticed by most people, and then finding a fresh way to present it to let people see what they're missing. In particular, those elusive qualities of meaning and beauty, so often get lost to us in the details and stresses pressed upon us...