Philip Koch Paintings

Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College, Lynchburg , VA I had the wrong major in college. Fortunately the campus art museum (Allen Memorial Art Museum) woke me up to what I was meant to do- paint. What a powerful impact even a smaller museum can have on a young artist. That's part of why I drove down from Baltimore to the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College  in Lynchburg, VA last week. They have an Edward Hopper landscape I needed to see (more later), but I was intrigued by what I'd seen  of their collection on-line as well. Thomas Cole, Corway Peak, New Hampshire,  oil on canvas, 1844 I'm a little different from many contemporary artists in that I've always looked for insight and inspiration from the artists who've gone down the path before me. When you're starting out you need guidance.  Allen Art Museum's giant color field painting by Larry Poons pushed me to explore what color could be made to do. I painted dozens of br...

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...

Last week I was up in Connecticut for the grand opening reception for the Art Essex Gallery  where nine of my oil paintings are hung in their inaugural exhibition. While there I did some painting right down on the water in East Haven, CT where the Farm river flows in to Long Island Sound. My old fried Bob Wetmore who I've known since elementary school days has a place right on the River. It's got amazing views. Above is Connecticut Shore,  oil on panel, 8 x 16", 2012.  The view is looking due east with Long Island Sound's open waters off to your right. This Connecticut low country played a big role in American art history- for example the American Impressionist landscape painters who gathered in Old Lyme. But for me this is special territory more for the work John Frederick Kensett (American 1816- 1872) who created some of the most amazing paintings from the 19th century of the shoreline of Connecticut and neighboring Rhode Island.  When I first started l...

Here's the entrance to Saginaw Art Museum's current exhibit of my paintings.  Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch  (through Feb. 19, 2012). The photo is taken from the beautiful glass enclosed walkway that leads from the Museum's original 19th century Mansion house to one of its new wings. Below I've turned around and photographed the doorway to the walkway currently full of handsome metal sculptures by David Holtslander. At the right is my oil  The Voyage of Memory , a piece inspired by the 19th century American painter Thomas Cole's series of four paintings,  The Voyage of Life  (I had the pleasure of seeing them again just last weekend down at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.). At the left is my oil  Otter Cove , which I'll return to later. Below is me posing with an oil by another of my early favorite artists, the American John F. Kensett. It's  Study for the Lakes of Killarny ,   that Kensett painted in 1856 while on...

Here's a view of Long Island Sound by the 19th century American painter John Kensett, who I've mentioned before. Superficially it looks like a whole lot of other pastoral landscape painters. But I think it's anything but ordinary. There is a startlingly abstract composition that hides beneath Kensett's delicately handled textured grasses. Squint your eyes just a tiny bit and look at how Kensett ties together the dark green shapes distant trees with the darkened horizontal line of the reddish distant field. To make this work his foreground had to be held much lighter in tone than was customary. I think Kensett, like all the great painters, had a remarkable grasp how much stranger and more surprising reality is than how we usually imagine it. He knew a lot, but when necessary he could let go of preconceptions and just see more clearly than most. The composition he ended up with was hinted at by the actual landscape he painted from, but it required his radical eye to strip...

We all have (or had) parents. They gave us life and a heck of a lot of other things. My wife Alice the therapist likes to point out that one of their gifts to us is to fail us. Had our parents been able to meet all our needs, not one of us would have been emotionally able to leave the nest. And there are important things that would have stayed unlearned had we never left home. Artists need a wealth of different talents. The ones usually checked off on everyone's list include an ability to draw, an eye for color, and a fabulous imagination. I'd like to proffer one additional talent- the ability to find heroes. I could have said teachers, but I mean something more than that. Sometimes we encounter the work of another artist that just pulls some hidden internal switch in us. You see their work and you feel a floodlight has been switched on revealing new terrain you just have to explore. For me, my first mega art-hero was an American landscape painter John Frederick Kensett (181...

Philip Koch, Evening Hillside, graphite and white pencil 7 1/2 x 13 7/8", 1971 You can go a long time just banging into things in the dark. As an undergraduate art major at Oberlin College I made a ton of paintings and drawings, learned mountains of new ideas, and produced very few pieces I could be genuinely proud of. My first 9 months in graduate school at Indiana University pretty much continued this confusing pace. Then events sharply pivoted, though even after all these decades I can't say exactly why. Perhaps imperceptibly the forces had been building up to the breaking point. In June 1971 the barn door burst open and out came the horses at full gallop. My work, all of a sudden, got good. Always before a terminally impatient artist, I managed to slow myself down from my usual headlong-rush-method of painting. The passion burned as strong as ever but I found ways to temper and modulate it. A big part of the success was I finally accepted that the artists of the past coul...