Philip Koch Paintings

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, Sun in an Empty Room III,  oil on panel, 12 x 9", 2012 To anyone who tries to follow contemporary art I want to say I understand why you feel confused. If it's true that art holds a mirror up to life, isn't this pretty much to be expected? Almost everyone I know is glad to be here. But that said, they're bewildered by living much of the time. "Contemporary Art" isn't a style. It just means art that has been made today. If used properly, the term extends all the way from performance art using digital video projections to work made by artists who think everything that happened after the 19th century French painter Ingres stinks. I have two observations. There has been an explosion in the number of possible ways artists can make art. A young student at my art school in Baltimore is expected to have at least familiarity with the following: digital art, video art. performance, inst...

Philip Koch, The Song of All Days,  oil on panel, 36 x72", 2008 The Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, DE will include my painting above in their Centennial Juried Exhibition Oct. 20 - Jan. 13, 2013. To accompany the show, the Museum has invited three of the included artists to teach studio workshops as part of their Regional Concepts  series of classes . They've asked me to teach a landscape drawing and painting workshop on the afternoon of Sunday, Oct. 21. Sometimes I'm asked if I think art can be taught. I feel that question turns the whole art experience on its head. All of us living have deep emotional responses to what goes on around us and within us- and that right there is the raw material of art. Everyone has something to say.  Studying painting or drawing puts some extra tools in your bag to help you tell others what you've seen and how you've felt. Not everyone is a Rembrandt. But give anyone the materials and even just a little ...

The earth, and everything on it is always moving. That's the problem, and the opportunity, for landscape painters. What I've talking about is that landscape forces an artist to be an activist. There is so much out there within the space you are painting, most of it constantly shifting darker or lighter and waving in the breeze.  To paint that you have to take charge. If you don't you don't get a painting to happen.  Above is a Rockwell Kent (American, 1882-1971) oil from Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine. If you remove the white capped waves, you're left with a dreadful painting. Kent has chosen to pull all the other tones down into a dark middle grey or darker so you really need those two key white accents. Kent played around with the shape of those whitecaps. They have two very  differing silhouettes, each moving across the painting surface in its own trajectory. I think these white waves feel alive and hint at  having distinct personalities.  Be...

Here's a watercolor by Winslow Homer ( Homosassa River, 1904 from the Brooklyn Museum) that caught my eye the other day. Realize it's done with an extremely restricted palette (except for a tiny red jacket on one of the fishermen, it's got hardly any intense color in it). Homer's bringing this one home with his remarkable ability to improvise and to "lie" about what he was looking at. How did he learn how to do this so well? It got me to wondering what sort of painting class Winslow Homer would run if he were to come back to life and hire a model.  Here is part of my figure painting workshop Dec. 10 at the Saginaw Art Museum . Kara Harris Brown, the Museum's Curator of Education did a great job of organizing the event (including bringing lots of donuts). I think everyone enjoyed themselves. I know I did. Watching my students work, it struck me the more accomplished painters had learned not just about color and composition. but also ho...

Philip Koch,  Edward Hopper's Beach, S. Truro, MA,  vine charcoal, 9 x 12", 2006 I teach two classes a week at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. It's a large art school ("America's oldest continuously degree-granting College of Fine Art"). PAFA up in Philadelphia is older, but we can claim Abraham Lincoln giving his second inaugural address at MICA, which is pretty cool. Every summer brings to an end a period of intense painting activity for me, a time when I do a lot and speak little about it to others. It's my annual "monk" period. This is good for it clears my head and allows me to think afresh about what I want to say to my students on the first day of class.  This Fall I'm teaching Life Drawing and an introductory Painting class. Both are required classes and always have a few over twenty students. I love teaching these offerings because I believe they offer perhaps the greatest potential to genuinely help young ...

   The Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Newport News, Virginia is showing my eight museum traveling exhibition Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch July 23 - August 2. There will be an opening reception and a brief artists talk Friday evening, July 22. Coupled with the big show of my landscape drawings and paintings, the museum will have me teach a one day landscape painting workshop. Regular readers of this blog are familiar with many of my ideas about the landscape from its philosophical significance to more practical concerns like how to connect one's drawing skill to oil painting. I hope some of you can join us for this workshop- these are always a lot of fun to teach and I know my students alwasy come away stronger painters. Here the information from the Peninsula Fine Arts Center's website. Here's the link  to their site. PAINTING WORKSHOP WITH PHILIP KOCH Saturday, July 23, 9am-4pm $100 Pfac member / $125 non-member Instructor: Philip Koch Stude...

I received an intriguing comment on my last blog post, Edward Hopper's Women, from a reader wondering how much Hopper chose his style of painting? Mulling over how to answer I found myself thinking about Emily Campbell, the graduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art who's been helping me teach my Life Drawing and Painting 1 classes. Above and below are some of the pieces Emily unveiled in her MFA Thesis show last Friday. In the oil above a little house seems to fall to pieces as it flies up over a forest. It's the sort of image one could easily encounter in a dream. How Emily came up with it I'm not sure, but I know she has a collection of little dolls and toys that likely set her mind to weaving this tale for us. I like the painting quite a bit, largely for her unexpected and quirky details in the background. The foliage isn't naturalistic, rather it's giving us a particular gestural rhythm not unlike the patterns you'd see in a child's...

This is a painting that was a huge inflence on my decision to switch to painting landscapes. It's by the German Renaissance painter Albrecht Altdorfer. He's often credited as being the first european artist to do a purely landscape oil painting (instead of having the landscape just be a background for human figures). This one is titled Battle of Issus  and was completed in 1529. If my memory serves me correctly, I ran into this completely-over-the-top painting in the art history textbook I was required to buy for my Art History 101 my freshman year at Oberlin College, Jansen's History of Art. (And if I'm wrong about that being the book, it was in another survey-of-art book I purchased shortly after that).  At the time I was painting abstract canvases under the influence of the art stars of the day, Frank Stella and Jules Olitski. Lacking much in the way of drawing skills, this was about all I could muster at the time. But blasting away in acrylic paint I churned o...

  This is a photo I took at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts out in Hagerstown, Maryland this morning. Here the workers who constructed the new roof over the Museum's enclosed courtyard are painting the beams that hold the large sheets of glass in place. It will be a couple more months before the courtyard project is completed but you can see it's going to be a great addition to the Museum. Below is an oil that's hanging in an exhibit now of the WCMFA's galleries of 19th century work from the Museum's Collection curated by Elizabeth Johns. The Museum has an amazingly good collection of American painting from this period, especially so when you think of what a modest sized city Hagerstown is. This one is Pool in the Meadow  by Hugh Bolton Jones (1848-1927) who I'm proud to say studied at the art school where I teach, the Maryland Institute College of Art. Some years ago I got to talking to a professional gardener. He was an aging hipp...

Philip Koch, North Passage, 18 x 24" oil on panel, 2011 (Above is a photo of eight shipping crates I made to send my paintings down to my exhibition this summer at the art museum in Newport News, Virginia. My wife commented how much this reminds her of a sculpture from the early 1970's by Don Judd, who at that time was considered very cutting edge). I often wonder whether there are more badly painted landscapes out there or more woefully unsuccessful attempts at "cutting edge" contemporary art. To see a truly excellent landscape painting is rare. So is seeing a really well done piece of avant garde art. Perhaps I'm less rattled by unsuccessful landscapes because they're usually pretty small. Most work in alternative media like installations, perormance art, or video takes up either a lot of physical space or consumes more of your time. In return for that, one's likely to expect a bigger reward for looking at the work....