Philip Koch Paintings

Note: I'm happy to announce the Burchfield Penny Art Center, one of the two major art museums in Buffalo, NY published my previous piece on one of Charles Burchfield's watercolors on their museum blog. You can read it   here. Anders Zorn (Sweedish,  1860 - 1920), Portrait of Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon  Apparently that is actually the title of the painting and the poor woman's name isn't going to be revealed to us.  That said, what a nice dog (also nameless, apparently) and moreover, what a stunning composition. We know we are never going to actually meet this woman or her proud looking hound. That Zorn could make us want to look more than once at this woman and her dog is proof of his remarkable skill as a painter. So often paintings, especially realist paintings, reveal some of their abstract artistry turned upside down. Zorn had an eye for making connections and instilling movement into his paintings. Look at the same painting inverted and see how he broke ...

Vermeer,  Lady with her Maidservant Holding a Letter, 1667,  Frick Collection, NYC Sometimes it feels like a piece of art picks us instead of the other way around. For years I had this painting by Vermeer stuck in my mind. I felt kind of uncool obsessing about such a pedestrian domestic scene. Yet I'd find myself thinking about the painting seemingly for no good reason. Art is primarily about psychology and the play of emotions in our lives. The question for painters is how best to foster that in the viewer.  Some years ago I started studying the psychologist Carl Jung. (If anyone out there is in the mood for challenging reading, this is the place to go. The guy loved nothing better than to include long passages in Greek, German, and English on each page. I kid you not). But he makes a convincing case for the active hand of the unconscious in guiding our actions.  Animals live guided by inborn impulses they don't understand but b...

Philip Koch, Still Pine, oil on panel, 12 x 12", 2012 Sometimes you'll read that a particular artist or a musician got their start because they were sickly and couldn't play with the other kids. Forced to stay home they would discover their inner calling. Well that happened to me too, but in my case it was because I was clumsy.  Of course there's lots of factors that pushed me to onto the path of becoming a landscape painter. One of the biggest is that I fell off my first bike. It spooked me.  Every time after, no matter how hard I tried, I'd freak out and lose my balance and go crash again. It's odd as I'm fairly well coordinated as an adult, but try as I might at six and seven years old, I just couldn't stay on that bike. There weren't many kids in my rural neighborhood to begin with and for those there were, bikes were big news. For several years, long after all my friends had mastered the art of the two wheeler, my secret shame was t...

Philip Koch, Entryway, Edward Hopper's Truro Studio Kitchen, oil on panel, 12 x 16", 2012 My oil above will be part of a small group of paintings I'll be showing at the  Edward Hopper House Art Center  in Nyack, New York March 31 - May  13, 2012. I was joking around with one of my students at MICA this week and told them something like "Artists are freaks. No wonder nobody understands us..." We both laughed and moved on. Later that day I recalled the incident, wondering if it were really true. The more I thought about it, I came to regret saying it. Edward Hopper, whose studio was the source for this painting, got me thinking about this from another angle. Artists are a creative lot, and there are some who've extended their creativity to their appearance to help them stand out from the crowd. It is after all hard to get attention for one's artwork. And historically there have always been too few opportunities for artists to survi...