Philip Koch Paintings

  At Somerville Manning Gallery yesterday- Left: Evergreen, Middle: Winter, Right: Narrow Cove Ogunquit At Somerville Manning Gallery yesterday,  Warm September I took four new paintings up to Somerville Manning Gallery in Greenville, DE yesterday. Two had just returned from Ogunquit Museum of American Art's exhibition Philip Koch: Isle of Dreams in Maine, and the other two were large canvases fresh off my easel.   Evergreen,   oil on canvas, 36 x 54 inches, 2022 (above).  When I was out on location painting the study for this large oil I had the feeling this was a home happily contented people lived in. Perhaps that's silly as I didn't see anyone around over the three mornings I worked on the painting. But there was something wonderful about their yard- bright sun splashing on exuberantly colored shutters and roof. Setting this off were the solemn dark evergreens, impressive in their size and obvious maturity.       Just retur...

Isalos Fine Art up in Stonington, Maine is opening a new show next week, Inside Edward Hopper's World: Paintings by Philip Koch. Michael Daugherty, who runs Isalos, wrote in the press release for the show about how the paintings document a little known side of the famous American realist painter  Hopper:  During 14 residencies, as well as time spent in the Nyack, New York house where Hopper lived until he was 30, Koch has inhabited the spaces in which Hopper lived. As Koch painted these spaces, he felt that he found clues to the inner life of the man, and expressed them in his own work. The paintings, pastels and charcoal drawings in this show are a small selection of many interiors and landscapes Koch has created over the years. You can download the catalogue that reproduces all 16 paintings to be included in the upcoming show free from a link on the gallery's website.   Here's a selection of some of the pages from the catalogue: Edward Hopper'...

Sun in an Empty Room II,  vine charcoal, 7 x 14", 2012 (drawn on location in Edward Hopper's boyhood bedroom in Nyack, NY) Vine charcoal is a medium known for its delicacy. But that fragility is something of a problem when it comes to moving such drawings. Until they're safely framed under glass you must handle them as if you're walking on eggshells. The drawing above   is in one of these crates below... ...along with 15 other paintings, pastels, and vine charcoal drawings look like when they're waiting to be picked up by the FedEx guy for their trip up for my solo exhibit at Isalos Fine Art in Stonington, Maine. None of the work for this upcoming show (Aug. 13 - Sept. 2, 2013) is particularly large, but since a half dozen of the pieces are works on paper framed under glass, they had to be wrapped generously in bubble wrap. The packaged pieces on paper like this get bulky pretty quickly. I'm determined to have the pieces arrive safely with...

One of the reasons I like being a painter instead of an art historian is I'm free to wander a bit more in my thinking. Artists love to make comparisons that jump from one artistic category to another. For example I was just looking at (alright, no surprise here!) Edward Hopper and the Canadian painter Lawren Harris (1885-1970). It hit me how the two, despite their difference in style, were instilling extra energy into their paintings with similar tools.  Here's Hopper's wonderful oil of his neightbor Burly Cobb's place, which was just over the hill south of Hopper's studio on Cape Cod.  I love his contrast of the big, open areas of the shingled roof played off against the much more abrupt rhythms of the smaller oblique roof shapes and chimneys at the lower right of the painting. Hopper was a master of giving his viewer big massive forms and then contrasting them against something small, sharp and unexpected. Any painter can do that, of course, but Hopper bin...

Let's conclude my guided tour of George Billis Gallery's current show Earth's Shadow: Landscapes by Philip Koch in New York (note: like many Chelsea art district galleries, Billis Gallery is closed for their holiday break and will reopen the exhibit Jan. 2 - 19, 2013).  I'm happy to report one of the major pieces in the show, Otter Cove , will be heading to its new home with some collectors in London. Here is  Northern Pines, Morning,  oil on panel, 12 x 24". It was painted on the same small pond that was the source for another oil in the show, Still Pine. M y wife and I discovered the source by wandering down an unmarked dirt road on our honeymoon thirty years ago in Acadia National Park in Maine.   Sheltered by the surrounding forests, the water there is always calm and can be counted on to have stunning reflections of the far shore's frieze of pines. I like to return every so often to work there. I have to smile thinking about the first...

Here's a tour of my second solo show at New York's George Billis Galler y that is on display until Jan, 19, 2013. I want to say something about each piece in the show, so probably I'll do this in three parts. You can enlarge any image by clicking on it. Let's start with the images above. This is Inland, oil on canvas, 44 x 55", the largest piece in the exhibition. For many years I've loved painting the forest interior in New England and the Adirondack Mountains. Often beaver ponds have caught my imagination, like this one. These furry little engineers clear out some of the trees, giving a landscape painter a shot at painting a deeper space like this one. This is  Ascension,  oil on panel, 40 x 32".  Ascension  is a large oil painted entirely from my memory and imagination. As the title suggests it conveys a feeling of rising up as its central focus. For many years I had been...

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 ...