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...

John Frederick Kensett, Hill Valley, Sunrise , oil on canvas, 1851 Last Friday my wife and I had a personal tour from Curator Anna Marley of the major exhibition she organized, From the Schuylkill to the Hudson: Landscapes of the Early American Republic , at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. I wrote a previous post about the the show's first pioneers of the American landscape painting movement. Their works were centered in Philadelphia, preceding the better known Hudson River School. This is a look at some favorites by later Hudson River School artists.  The John Kensett oil above is a masterpiece of seeing. Kensett is renowned for his diaphanous brushwork. But he corrals his strokes into solid cohesive shapes with inventive silhouettes. Our eye gets a wild ride tracing the outline of the tops of his trees at the left and over the lines of the mountain ridges at the right. Our responses to art are highly subjective, including mine. I know on...

Albert Bierstadt, Niagara, oil on paper laid down on canvas, 1869 One of the things that sustains me as a landscape painter is understanding I am part of an historic movement of artists who took delight in our planet. Each generation of landscape painters adds their own contemporary voice to a chain of paintings stretching back hundreds of years. Especially in our time of impending climate crisis reigniting the deep strain of environmental sentiment that runs all through American landscape art is part of my personal mission. This week Anna Marley, the Curator of Historic American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, very kindly gave me and my wife a personal tour of her major exhibition From the Schuylkill to the Hudson: Landscapes of the Early American Republic  shining a light on the earlier beginnings of landscape painting our country. Contrary to the usual understanding, Marley shows the much better known...

- Last weekend I did some time traveling.  Or so it seemed.  I took a trip with the Baltimore Museum of Art 's Prints, Drawings and Photographs Society to the Princeton University Art Museum . Upon entering the Museum's galleries I fell almost immediately into an unassuming drawing by one of the great old masters of American painting, Thomas Cole (1801-1848), the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. Titled simply Rocks, Trees, and Dog, Cole made it out probably while out on one of his nature hikes in 1846, just two years before his untimely death.  As I looked at it I had the sensation that old as it was, it could have been drawn by Charles Burchfield (Am. 1893- 1967) whose drawings I've been studying the last couple of years in the Archives at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY.  Modest as Cole's drawing is in scale, it has a lot to say-playing eloquently with themes of solidity and permanence v.s. forms ...

The holidays are a time to get together with good old friends. My wife Alice and I decided to drive down to Washington, DC to our favorite museum. The  Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) has an enormous and unrivaled permanent collection. We've visited it ever so many times that many of my "old friends" are to be found hanging on its walls.   They have the best angel painting ever, Abott Henderson Thayer's Stevenson Memorial. Can't help myself, just love that painting for how  it sounds its contemplative and slightly melancholy mood.  T hat's me soaking it up. Here's an old friend, Edward Hopper, who people never think of as a celebratory artist. Here's his  Ryder House, to me it's a stirring hymn to the brilliance of sunlight on a white wall. Its light seems to pulse with its own clear energy. Look at how the artist pushes the highlights on the sunlit grasses down way darker than the whites on the house. He kno...

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...

Above is just the background from one of my favorite early 19th century painters, Thomas Cole (1801- 1848). With very little professional training, Cole's paintings blazed a trail with his wholehearted embrace of what was to the European settlers (Cole himself was born in England) a wildly unknown continent. Cole made something new. Through September 23, 2012, the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme Connecticut has an exchange exhibition from the Albany Institute of History and Art. It explores the work and ideas of the first original movement in American art history, the Hudson River School. A few days ago I ran across an interview with Amy Kurtz Lansing, the Curator at the Florence Griswold Museum. I've always felt this almost 200 year old group of artists was pivotal in forming how Americans think and feel about themselves. Kurtz Lansing deftly puts her finger on a key role their work played in our imaginations: "Before the Hudson River S...