Philip Koch Paintings

  Philip Koch, Winter , oil on canvas, 36 x48 inches, 2021 If this painting looks like it's too cold that's good. It's a painting I made as a thank you for an early lesson cold winter gave me. It's done mostly from memory of my childhood in upstate New York. We lived right on the shore of Lake Ontario. Summers there were sweet. While the water was always on the cold side for swimming that never stopped us kids. Even on the hottest days there would be a breeze off the lake that kept the air comfortable.  Come winter things changed. Strong winds blew down from Canada  and vacuumed away even the most stubborn leaves that tried to cling to their branches. The Ontario shoreline quickly froze over with a glistening coat of ice.  Splashing waves would gradually build up mysterious forms that looked like icebergs. When the sun shone down on this I found it spellbindingly beautiful. We kids climbed all over the fantasy-like playgrounds these little ice mountains would gr...

Wanted to share a little  background on some of the paintings in Somerville Manning Gallery's solo show of my work April 9 - May 8, 2021. First here's an interview we did about the show It's with the gallery's director Rebecca Moore. The interview was broadcast 4/28/21 on WCHE 1520 radio near Philadelphia. Somerville Manning Gallery's exhibition of Philip Koch paintings continues through May 8, 2021 Here are some individual paintings in the show. Radiance, oil on panel, 12 x 24 inches, one of the paintings Rebecca Moore talks about early in our interview. This is a view of one of the tidal marshes in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. I originally found the spot by jogging down a road whose name I liked- King Phillip Road.     The Reach IV, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches, another of the paintings discussed in the radio interview. This is one of my most autobiographical paintings, a tribute to the love I felt from my father who used to take me sailing at night on one of the ...

Philip Koch, Edward Hopper's Parlor, oil on canvas 32 x 24 inches, 2019 Where to great ideas come from for artists? There are all sorts of answers advanced to that question. When we artists are at our best our hands seem to be guided by a part of ourselves that is just beyond our awareness. I'm convinced great art reaches deep into an artist's psyche to borrow images that have been echoing there since their childhood.  This was driven home to me when an old friend of mine from my boyhood town of Webster, NY came to visit me. Seeing an array of my paintings in my studio he exclaimed "Phil, this is our old neighborhood." Actually I'd never painted in my old hometown. The paintings he was looking at ranged from scenes I'd painted not in Webster, NY but in far flung locales all over the country. Others were fanciful imaginary landscapes. Going around the room he named places we played as young children that these paintings echoed.  Ab...

Inevitably the theme of new beginnings is wrapped up in our notion of Spring. There's a famous painting by the Renaissance artist Botticelli called Primavera  of the goddess of Spring appearing out of the sea carrying garlands of flowers. Most of you know it. To those of us who live in Northern climates, this is no small thing. But for me, when the snow and ice return, I always thing back to my own personal fresh start. Way back in the Fall of 1966, after several years of feeling like I was holding my breath to get through high school, I left little Webster, NY and headed off to my Freshman year at Oberlin College in Ohio. As was the case for so many of us, high school was an awkward and sometimes difficult stage to endure. What kept me going was the thought I would one day leave home, get a fresh start, and everything would be better. That is exactly what happened.  But, and it's a big but, not in the way I expected.  I came from a long line of co...

One of Canada's best painters, Lawren Harris (1885- 1970), continues to fascinate me.  Partly it's my attachment to the North. I grew up on the shore of Lake Ontario near Rochester, NY. One of my parents had gone to school in Toronto and used to speak excitedly of that experience. When you're 5 and 6 years old, hearing there was "another country" on the other side of the water summoned up all sorts of imaginative visions. I used to climb to the top of the highest hill near my house and strain to see this strange place called Canada. One couldn't of course, but that just added to the intrigue. Lawren Harris was the key figure in the early 20th century Canadian movement known as the Group of Seven. I learned about their work as my sister Kathy lives in Toronto and began sending me postcards of Harris's work early on in my painting career.  Above is one of Harris' views of Lake Superior. I particularly like the water's surface with its...

Philip Koch, Still Pine, oil on panel, 12 x 12", 2012 Sometimes you'll read that a particular artist or a musician got their start because they were sickly and couldn't play with the other kids. Forced to stay home they would discover their inner calling. Well that happened to me too, but in my case it was because I was clumsy.  Of course there's lots of factors that pushed me to onto the path of becoming a landscape painter. One of the biggest is that I fell off my first bike. It spooked me.  Every time after, no matter how hard I tried, I'd freak out and lose my balance and go crash again. It's odd as I'm fairly well coordinated as an adult, but try as I might at six and seven years old, I just couldn't stay on that bike. There weren't many kids in my rural neighborhood to begin with and for those there were, bikes were big news. For several years, long after all my friends had mastered the art of the two wheeler, my secret shame was t...

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...

Philip Koch , The Reach III,  oil on linen, 40 x 60", 2011 Here's another of the big oils that will be debuting in the Maryland Institute College of Art's Sabbatical Exhibition Dec.1- 18th. It's an elaboration on a vision I explored earlier on two smaller oils. You might say it's an image I can't get out of my head. There's a good reason for that. It's a painting about how I learned to be an artist. From the time I was eight until I reached twelve my father used to love to go sailing on Lake Ontario at night and he'd take me along. As a kid I confess I found nighttime a little scary so I was never as enthusiastic to go on these voyages as my father. Sometimes it was so dark what we were doing was probably foolhardy. Usually though, once your eyes adjusted, you realized there was surprising illumination. If the moon was out it bathed you in its quiet twilight tones. Sailboats are slow and unless it was  blowing really hard there...

A few years ago the contemporary art world was making a big fuss over the artist Jeff Koons. Above is his ceramic sculpture  Michael Jackson and Bubbles.  The prevailing wisdom was that Koons was making a tongue in cheek sculpture that broke lots of rules about what constituted "serious" art. Some art critics said Koons was exploring the monumental role played by entertainment celebrities in our culture like Michael Jackson. The scupture was a reference back to renaissance pieces of the Madonna holding the Christ child. Replacing Christ with Bubbles the Chimp was meant to illuminate the withering influence of religious iconography in our lives. So some said.  I suppose one could say this sculpture is "so bad that it's good" with its strenuous attempts to go with over the top cheesiness. For many in the art world, one's ability to "get it" with Koons' work was a badge of honor. You had to be very sophisticated to like such stuff.  Below is an...

Here's a painting perfect for today's Winter Solstice- Lawren Harris, Isolation Peak, oil on canvas. (Harris was a Canadian landscape painter active in the earlier years of the 20th century. He's sort of a northern equivalent of the American regionalist painters Charles Burchfield and Grant Wood) I grew up on the extreme northern border of the U.S. on the shore of Lake Ontario. As kids we imagined that if we so much as put our toe into Lake Ontario we were leaving the country. My mother had gone to school in Toronto and seemed to have warm memories of the experience, so I imagined that across Ontario's waters this place called Canada must be something special. In a way it is. The farther north you go, the lower the sun hangs in the sky. On sunny days the shadows are poignantly long and sharp- just the stuff to excite the painter's eye.  It's fascinating to compare the above Isolation Peak with the Lawren Harris below, Mt. LeFroy.  Both start out with the same...