Philip Koch Paintings

Andria Derstine, the Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, OH sent out a holiday greeting yesterday and chose as an illustration an oil by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859- 1937),  Flight into Egypt.  I've always thought Tanner, an important African American painter, was too little known and was happy to hear my alma mater's art museum added one of his paintings for their collection in 2017. To me he's an impressive painter with supreme visual skills. Tanner was a religious man and depicted the Holy Family leaving Bethlehem in 15 paintings over his life time. Clearly this was a story the guy wanted to tell. His painting has a way of drawing you in whether or not you're traditionally religious. Painters tell their stories through how they shape things. Tanner first makes a crytalline sky that casts a mysterious atmosphere over the scene. Riding under a cloak of darkness we see the Holy Family with hardly a detail. But Tanner entices our eyes t...

Peter Paul Rubens, The Finding of Erichthonius, oil  on  canvas, 1632, Allen Memorial Art Museum,  Oberlin, OH Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, OH invited alumni to tell how work in its collection had impacted them. Their collection proved to be an amazing teacher. The big lesson I learned is to take exquisite care about how I go about telling a story with my painting. Yesterday the museum posted my reminiscence on its Facebook page. Here's what I wrote:  The temptation is always to run straight towards your goal. Sometimes that works, but often it leaves you wide of the mark, especially in art. This lesson hit me over the head when I was just starting out as a painter when I was a studio art major at Oberlin. The Allen Memorial Art Museum has the most remarkable and troubling painting by the 17th-century artist Rubens, 'The Finding of Erichthonius,' from 1632. I saw it almost daily and I was always a little creeped out by it. Its subject involves t...

The first four years of my life we lived a house with a sandbox in our backyard. It was a substantial wooden construction that my parents had replenished with new sand by the time I, the youngest of three, came along. Pulling my hands across the sand's soft surface delighted my tiny fingers. And best of all were the amazing patterns that magically emerged on the sand in my fingers' wake. In a funny way, that sandbox was my first art school. Humans have been "playing in the dirt" like that for our whole history. It's embedded in minds, this love of making simple shapes and patterns on a flat surface. Here above is an oil by Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997). In addition to being vividly colored, the painting shows some of that "sandbox playfulness" with the artist dragging his brush, scratching back over previously drawn shapes, wiping out and so on. Looked at as a design on a flat surface, the painting has a certain appeal. Also the woman's spac...

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...

I'm going to be giving a talk next month that will be titled Three Things You Didn't Know About Edward Hopper  up at the Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, NY. There are dozens of things I could touch on. One topic I may talk about is Hopper's talents as a colorist, which in my mind were considerable. Early in his career Hopper did dozens of beautiful etchings like the one above of cows ambling over some railroad tracks. Hopper's strengths with color in part stem from his long practice at mastering traditional drawing issues- creating expressive flat shapes, composing darks and lights, building solid volumes. Let's look at the cows above. Two of them are partly obscured by a foreground shadow but the third has clambered up into the light. It's pyramid-shaped back is highlighted against the far distant dark forest. You sense there's something about the house that reminds you of what you've seen and felt in that cow. Surely it's the shape of...

Philip Koch, Adirondack Charcoal #2,  vine charcoal, 7 x 14", 2011 A drawing by Sol LeWitt Navigating today's art world can be dizzying. Nobody's got a compass. Above are two examples of contemporary drawing. The first is my own, Adirondack Charcoal #2, vine charcoal, 7 x 14", 2011 that I made up on location in Lake Placid, NY last fall. The second is by Sol LeWitt, American, 1928 - 2007, a prominent conceptual and minimal artist. I paired the two to show how far apart the outer boundaries have been set. Last week I received an email from an art historian, Veronica Roberts, who's writing the catalogue raisonne on LeWitt. She's trying to track down information on a LeWitt drawing that was "made" by two students at my old school, Oberlin College in 1970. LeWitt is labeled conceptual because he was playing around with our notions of what we expect drawing to be. I think his intent was to "do the art part" well before his drawings made i...

Charlton Heston as Michelangelo painting the Cistine Chapel ceiling. Sometimes at an opening reception people come up to me and innocently ask me how I became an artist. I don't ususally tell them about Charlton Heston. Sometimes the oddest things provide just the right nudge to get you moving on a new path. So it was with me and Charlton. I came from a family of academics and was groomed to be a college professor. In the fall of 1966 I entered Oberlin College in Ohio certain I was headed for a career as a sociologist or an historian. No doubt about it. To prove my seriousness I had signed up not only for Sociology 101 my very first semester but also dutifully enrolled in an Art History survey class to get the requirement for graduation of a course "in art or music" out of the way. I was going to clear the decks so I could get serious about my budding sociology or history career. As luck would have it, my Sociology class was taught by a shy and awkward instructor who s...

Later this Fall I'll be heading north to go and work in the old painting studio of perhaps the most prominent 20th century American realist artist, Edward Hopper. That's Hopper above in a self portrait done in his maturity. I've been very fortunate to have the opportunity to stay and paint in his studio thirteen times since 1983, due to the generosity of it's current owners. I love the portrait above. Hopper seems to gaze out at us with a thoughtfulness and understanding I find touching. In reality he was a complex personality, troubled by depression and some social anxiety that pushed him to live an almost reclusive life. But while that may be true, he was also a man of enormous talents and extreme generosity, devoting his life to a vision that has meant so much to so many. In my own case, I think I owe 90% of my current direction as a painter to this man. I was an art major at Oberlin College in the late 1960's. Seeking the approval of my teachers, I did work like...

This is my studio this morning. Late yesterday the four heavy wooden crates came home carrying my paintings from my national traveling exhibition Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch. These same crates carried the show out to Washington State to the Clylmer Museum of Art in Ellensburg early this year and then traveled to Indiana for the Midwest Museum of American Art's installment of the show this June. They'll be staying home until next summer when they'll take the show down to a beautiful non-collecting art museum, the Peninsula Fine Art Center in Newport News, Virginia. My wife Alice and I drove down to see the museum and talk with it's Curator, Michael Preble, last May. We liked what we found very much and are excited to show there next summer. I learned long ago that sending one's art out of town was both a lot of work and totally worth the effort. Art is first of all a communication . Art isn't just the airing of someone's idiosyncrasies. It uses ...

There really is a secret of art. In fact there's a bunch of 'em. Trouble is they have a slippery habit of disappearing from your mind like misplaced little gems. All of us have to re-discover them. I just rediscovered one of them the other day and want to tell you about it. Years ago I came to a crisis in my Freshman year at Oberlin College. I'd been planning to become a sociology major and was hip deep in the middle of writing my first 20 page sociology paper. It hadn't been going well and one evening, in complete disgust, I threw down my pen and stomped off to the movies. I'd never gone to the theater alone before so it felt odd as I walked up to the little one screen theater in the town. As it turned out, they were showing a film where Charlton Heston played Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. As you might guess from that casting choice, it wasn't the most sensitive films on the question of how artists invent their art. At the film's clima...

My education happened in the Midwest. Four years at Oberlin College in Ohio where I had gone to study to become a sociologist...I thought. Took a required art history class my first semester to get it out of the way and found to my surprise it was the only class whose lectures I looked forward to. They put you in a dark room and showed you picture- lots of 'em. Some were amazing. I took two studio classes my second semester, loved them and never looked back. A year followed where I experimented with design and color, turning out a painting or two a day in rapid succession. My then girlfriend brought up a disturbing question however, "Phil shouldn't an artist learn how to draw?" My profs actually had given me a decent introduction to abstract design and color theory, but "drawing" in the traditional sense just wasn't on their horizon. After initial reluctance, I had to admit the girlfriend had a point. After all if I was going to be a great artist (no sha...

Image courtesy Art Renewal Center This is a painting that made a huge impact on me when I was a Freshman at Oberlin College in 1970. It's by Hendrick Terbruggen of St. Sebastian having these terrible arrows removed from his body. It was painted way back in 1625. It hung in the College's Allen Memorial Art Museum. At the time I foolishly believed all colleges had such amenities as great master paintings. It was a small campus and I was able to visit the museum a lot, sometimes daily, and most often it was mine alone. The quiet was delicious. What struck me about the painting is that a scene that could only be described as ghastly was painted with such delicacy and an overall serenity. The woman reaching for the arrow looks like she has sweet music playing in her head. Strangely I found the painting reassuring. While I'd had no arrows piercing me recently, I had had some genuinely troubling years in high school. Here was St. Sebastian being treated with such unbelievable tend...