Philip Koch Paintings

Winslow Homer, Eight Bells, oil on canvas, 1886, Addison  Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA Right before Christmas my wife Alice and I drove up from Baltimore to the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, PA to see their exhibition Winslow Homer: Photography and the Art of Painting. Organized by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art Co-Director Frank H. Goodyear and Dana Byrd, an art history professor at Bowdoin, the show runs through Feb. 14, 2019. Included in the show is a camera that had belonged to Homer. It's a treat to see this artifact from another time- it's partly made of wood! Along with photos Homer had taken, the curators pulled together  a stunning group of Homer oils from several museums.  Homer was incredibly sensitive to the design of his paintings. Here's an example: His two mariners work together to squeeze the empty space between them into an expressive shape of its own. Though they're both dressed i...

Josephine Tota,  untitled,  egg tempera, on view at Memorial  Art Gallery, Rochester, NY In the 4th grade I was bussed along with my class to my local art museum, the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) in Rochester, NY. I loved it. One painting from that long ago trip stands out in my mind, the Museum's Winslow Homer oil of his studio wrapped in a morning fog. Homer's painting immediately connected with me because it looked so much like the fog I often saw on the rocky shore of Lake Ontario where we lived. I credit that trip to the Museum as an important first nudge toward my becoming an artist. Wall panel introducing The Surreal Visions of Josephine Tota exhibition at Memorial Art Gallery. MAG also played a big hand in the life of the artist Josephine Tota,  an all but unknown Italian immigrant who lived in Rochester and took art classes at MAG's Creative Workshop. Several years ago Jessica Marten, the Museum's Curator in Charge, ran across t...