Philip Koch Paintings

  Art New England's July/August issue carries Carl Little's review of Ogunquit Museum of American Art's exhibition of Koch's paintings.

Edward Hopper, Mrs. Scott's House, oil on canvas, 34 1/4 x 50 1/8 inches, 1932, Maier  Museum of Art at Randolph College, Lynchburg, VA I don't usually start a painting with another artist's painting in mind. My new canvas below however owes a big debt to Hopper's oil Mrs. Scott's House  that's in the collection of the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA. Edward Hopper and his wife Josephine first stayed on Cape Cod in the summer of 1930. For the next several summers they explored the land out near the very end of Cape Cod's peninsula.  Famously private, I suspect he liked how few people there were in the remote town of Truro.  One striking painting that resulted from this searching was Mrs. Scott's House  seen above.  Hopper was always drawn to paint big, solid volumes illuminated by brilliant sunlight. He must have loved the stark contrast of the massive and nearly bare dunes against the small but stubbornly u...

Above is the two-page spread on my paintings that appears in the new Volume 24 of Studio Visit  magazine. Given that these two of my favorite paintings are reaching a broader audience I thought it would be good to tell a little more about them. In this post I'll take up the first one. Inland , oil on canvas, 45 x 60", 2008  at George Billis Gallery, New York The forests of inland New England are really dense. So much so that I often resort to searching out the clearing provided by a beaver pond so I can see more of a vista. In the early days of American landscape painting small farms dotted New England. Painters of the Hudson River School like Cole and Church could set up their easels anywhere and likely find a panoramic view without too much trouble. That all changed with the expansion of mechanized agriculture in the Midwest. New England's rocky soil and hilly sloping fields made the going harder. A lot of New England farms failed and their...

Who doesn't want to feel a part of something bigger than ourselves? That's always been at the heart of landscape painting, an art form that is most often a hymn of praise to our earthly planet. Above is one of my favorite paintings, Schroon Mountain by the first great American painter who turned his focus on the look and feel of the wilderness, Thomas Cole (1801-1848). When I was in my grad school painting program from 1970-72 at Indiana University I got a hold of a book that had a splendidly colored reproduction of this painting. This painting was one of the spurs that propelled me into becoming a landscape artist myself.  Cole's oil (from 1838, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art) depicts a mountain in New York State's Adirondacks. I feel it is one of Cole's best. The artist masterfully breaks up what could have been a monotonous jumble of 10,000 individual trees into dramatically contrasting large shapes. He cleverly plays off a spotlighted an...

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...

George Billis Gallery in New York will be holding their second solo show of my paintings this Dec. 11 - Jan. 19, 2013. In the meantime, Billis Gallery has been working to establish a new venue in the historic town of Essex in Connecticut and has invited me to show a number of works in their inaugural show. The grand opening reception for the Art Essex Gallery is this Saturday, August 4 from 5-8 p.m. I will be attending so if you're in the area please come by and say hello. Here are some of the my paintings that will be in the Art Essex Gallery. Above is Road to the Shore , oil on canvas, 42 x 28". Painted near a small country lake, the source originally caught my eye because it reminded me so much of the quarter mile long drive way I used to walk everyday going to stand at the bus stop for the school bus to pick me up. It had a marvelous canopy of branches overhead. Walking along it you usually found yourself looking up. It's a favorite memory. This ...

There's a long history of American landscape painters heading north up from New York along the Hudson River to the Catskill Mountains, along the coast to Maine, and inland to the Green Mountains of Vermont. Every year I make several trips to the landscape painter's Mecca of New England myself, varying the destination from one place to another. I love it. Last night I returned from another painting excursion, this time to Vermont. On these trips I soak up the terrain and the region's amazing art history. You can see exactly the same sources as Winslow Homer used or those of the wonderful Hudson River School painters  John Kennsett or Sanford Gifford. As you paint a conversation opens up between our 21st century eyes and those of our pioneer 19th century landscape artists. Part of the fun is discovering how much we in 2011 see a little differently than our landscape painting forebearers. As it's right around the summer solstice the sun comes up incredibly early, ...

On my way back home from my exhibit at Edgewater Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont , I stopped last week in Manchester, VT at the Southern Vermont Arts Center . I'm glad I did. The place has a drop dead gorgeous setting on an old wooded estate at the foot of a mountain. My friend Christine Neill, a fellow professor with me at MICA and a very fine painter, has an impressive show of her semi-abstract watercolors on display there now. Above is one of the Center's facilities, the Wilson Museum, which often shows works from SVAC's Permanent Collection. Below is one piece on dispaly, a modest still life by Luigi Lucioni, the Italian born American painter (1900 - 1988) who spent time painting in this part of Vermont. Titled Lemon and Beaker. I fell in love with it. The painter has the look of a hyper-realist, but if one looks closely one realizes Lucioni was a master at abstract composition. He carefully adjusts the levels of darkness in his shadows to emphasize just his favor...

Philip Koch, Northern Sky: Orange II, oil, 15 x 22 1/2" 2010 Philip Koch, Orchard, oil, 16 x 24", 2010 Above are two of the 21 oils on paper I just shipped off to George Billis Gallery in New York. Both were completed this year and are about the same size, but in mood and handling, they couldn't be more different. Let me explain. I've always loved going back into older paintings to see if I can't make them stronger. My batting average over the years of doing this has been pretty good- I'd say well over 90%. With odds like that how could you not keep re-visiting and re-arranging things. At the same time, it's critical that I maintain a sense of forward momentum too. So I like to be working on brand new projects too. As my color sense has evolved over the years towards more intense colors other changes have been afoot as well. I've stopped painting directly from life, preferring to work from vine charcoal drawings I've done outside, or sometimes out ...

Philip Koch, Edward Hopper's Rooms by the Sea, oil on canvas, 42 x 63" Above is a painting that's something of a love letter to the painting below by the famous American realist painter Edward Hopper. It's titled simply Rooms by the Sea and lives in the Yale University Art Gallery. When I was a teenager I saw this Hopper's oil reproduced in Time magazine and thought it was strange, but also pretty good. It was the first Hopper image I'd ever seen. Little did I know back then I had just met the man who would have the biggest single influence on my career as a painter. Hopper's painting is a fictionalized version of the corner of his painting room in the studio he had built for himself in 1934 out near the tip of Cape Cod in South Truro, MA. In a lot of ways its a hymn to the beauty of the sea and the famous Cape Cod light. My own painting is more naturalistic and is a bit more faithful to the actual arrangement of the doors, the sunlight, and the water. Co...

Philip Koch, Bend in the Pond, 55 x 44" Collection University of Maryland University College People turn to visual art because it gives concrete form to something elusive yet important. We want to see the tangible evidence that, like ourselves, other people too have sensed the romance and drama that stirs within all of us. Art does this and thereby makes us feel less alone. This is a piece that is several years older. It was painted from a plein air oil that was 25 x 20", a touch larger than my usual practice outside. It is from an old mill pond up in the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts that powered a sawmill back in the 19th century. The remains of the old wooden waterwheel lay in the woods not a hundred feet from where I stood painting. As the small oil was larger than usual it took me several days to complete it. Next to where I stood was a rowboat and waiting oars. I imagined as a reward for finishing the painting I'd take it for a spin and explore the far side ...