Philip Koch Paintings

    Philip Koch, Inland II, oil on canvas, 45 x 60 inches, 2020 Paintings are about what fascinates us.  People often remark my paintings celebrate light and shadow. This began for me in an unusual way.  When I was very young my family lived in a deep forest on the northernmost border of the US. I confessed to my father I worried about getting lost. He smiled and told me I could find my way by studying the sunlight- that we lived so far north the shadows cast by the trees pretty much always pointed north. I was charmed by the idea and found it worked.  Now years later the idea that the light keeps us from getting lost seems an apt metaphor for living.   

I literally stumbled into a fabulous show a couple weeks back. I was driving back from visiting the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, NY where I'll be having a show and giving an artists' talk at the end of March. Stopped in the Reading Public Museum  (I love that name) in Pennsylvania and saw their big   American Impressionism: The Lure of the Artists' Colony exhibition . Unfortunately between organizing the show at the Hopper House Art Center and writing an article on my traveling museum exhibition Unbroken Thread for Fine Art Connoisseur magazine (which I finally finished today!), I haven't had time until now to post about this amazing show at the Reading Museum. It is drop dead gorgeous. Drawn entirely from the Museum's Permanent Collection, it is simply one of the strongest painting shows I've ever seen. That's the good news. The bad news is it ends January 29th. Maybe if you drop everything... Above is a knockout painting by the Boston Imp...

Above is Monhegan Houses, Maine painted early on in Hopper's career around 1916-9. Monhegan was popularized as a great place to paint among artists largely through Hopper's charismatic teacher Robert Henri. Hopper was one of many who made voyages out to the little Maine island. His fellow Henri student, Rockwell Kent, liked Monhegan even better than Hopper and chose to stay and build a formidable studio there later owned by Jamie Wyeth, but that's another story. Hopper did mostly small plein air oils while up there, and they rank among the very best paintings ever made of the island. This one's a view of the tiny village with Manana Island in the background. Nowadays lots of artists have painted similar views, though most lack Hopper's expressiveness. One reason this oil has such power is Hopper's restraint. If you squint your eyes a bit when looking at it you immediately are struck by how Hopper segregated all his really light colors to just the very center of...

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 the view standing in the old masters gallery at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland. It's just west of the first long string of mountains you hit as you travel in from the coast near Washington, DC and Baltimore. Because of this geography, it was right on the route the Confederate Army took heading to and retreating from Gettysburg during the Civil War. Apparently Lee's army camped on the grounds where the Museum is now located. Dripping with history, the setting is also very beautiful. I attended the Members Annual Meeting today at the Museum. Had the chance to meet the President of the Board of Trustees, Tom Newcomer. He's an energetic supporter of the Museum and proved an engaging speaker as he chaired the meeting. Here he is framed by the work from the local Valley Art Association now hanging in one of the galleries. In addition to displaying the work of famous artists, the Museum has a long and commendable history of exhibiting the...

Philip Koch, Edward Hopper's Studio Kitchen, oil on panel, 15 x 20", 1997 I've been scanning slides of my older paintings again to save them as digital files (kicking and screaming, I'm being dragged into the present day...). Here's one I scanned yesterday of a favorite painting done on my French easel in the kitchen of Edward Hopper's old painting studio in Truro, MA, on Cape Cod. It was done on one of the recurring residencies I've enjoyed in the place. Spending time there you discover little truths about this formidable painter. One extravagance of the studio is it has the absolute maximum possible number of windows facing out in all directions. All provide an unobstructed view of the hump shaped dunes and the Cape Cod sky. Standing in the studio you have the feeling it is a sort of observatory for the Cape's legendary light. It literally catches both the first and last rays of each day's sunlight. And the light through the open kitchen door is ...

Philip Koch, Night in the Mountains, pastel, 9 x 12", 1999 The above is a pastel done from a plein air vine charcoal drawing I did at Lake Megunticook just outside Camden, Maine. Though it rained steadily for much of the time I was there, it was still possible to gather the impressive silhouettes of the lakes and mountains that Maine offers up so well. It meant also that from the get go I had to imagine a light and shadow situation more vivid and helpful than that supplied by the elements. I've developed a habit of drawing when necessary from the front seat of a rental car that has served me well on quite a few painting trips to New England. If you're serious about painting, you can't let nasty weather stop you. In fact, it's part of the adventure of trying to make paintings about the out of doors. All the painters I most admire worked their way through the challenge of bad weather. When I have an exhibition of my work, part of what I am showing off is my ability t...

Edward Hopper , Gas , oil on canvas Isabella hiding in flower pot in my garden 9/10/09 Above are examples of high and low art (I'll leave it to the viewer to decide which is which). In the earlier post this week "Why Insight Is More Like a Cat Than a Dog" I ask how an artist gets good ideas. Yesterday I was walking out of my house to go to a wedding and ran across the acknowledged master of these deeper questions, my neighbor's cat Isabella. She usually hides behind the tree that holds up my bird feeder. But recently she's taken to skulking in my neighbor's flower pot in her quest for little bird canapes. She does it for hours on end. If she's patient enough and keeps her eyes open it works. The other masterpiece pictured above is by Edward Hopper. It depicts a gas station at dusk on the old route 6 highway that threads up the forested middle of Cape Cod. Hopper drove an old Buick and, gas guzzler that it no doubt was, refueling it gave him time to day d...

In the last post I mentioned staying and working in Edward Hopper's painting studio on Cape Cod. Above is an 8 x 10" oil on panel I did last October in his studio's painting room. The easel shown is the one Hopper used for decades to paint many of his most famous oils. Pictured below is Rooms by the Sea, now in the Yale University Art Gallery, which is one of my favorite Hopper's. It is exactly the viewpoint Hopper would have had when he sat down to paint his studio doorway opening out to Cape Cod Bay. But he made one big change- moving the sun north so it shone directly onto the door itself. It's an invention on his part that makes the painting happen. Hopper set a great example in his openness to his surroundings. In looking at the ordinary corner and door way he felt subtle stirrings in his heart and found a way to translate them into shape and color. He evoked similar feelings in countless viewers of his painting. This is a man who never accepted a pat answer o...