Philip Koch Paintings

Philip Koch, Penobscot Bay #1, pastel, 7 x 14 inches, 1999 Just before I went to bed last night I was looking at the above pastel for the first time in a long while. My first thought was that the drawing wasn't sure if it was about brightening sun or darkening storms. Then I decided that was its point. Way back in 1999 my feelings had been hurt when a relative had forgotten to invite me to an important family wedding. Not wanting to sit home moping  I booked a last minute flight to Maine to paint for a week in the coastline of Penobscot Bay.   The area lived up its reputation for striking natural beauty. But Maine can be notorious for rain and gloom and the art gods had decided that was being to be the menu for that week. Every day it poured.  Of course I was disappointed but I'd come prepared and was able to turn the front seat of my rental car into a makeshift studio, making a series of finished charcoal drawings of the landscape.  Later on thes...

Philip Koch, Recollection, oil on canvas, 36 x 72 inches, 2000. This painting is based on the pastel drawing below. Funny story about this large painting. It's based on a pastel that in turn was made from an an on-site vine charcoal drawing. At certain times in my career I found working in stages like this allowed me to be playfully creative with color. My wife Alice and I were on one of our painting excursions, flying from Baltimore to Northern California. Once there I was taken by the sweeping panorama of San Francisco Bay from the summit of Mount Tamalpais just north of the city. We had crystal clear weather. With such a good viewpoint I grabbed my vine charcoals and set to work on a view of the Bay. Then the legendary fog of San Francisco rolled in like a freight train. In five minutes my subject was completely erased from view.   Philip Koch, Recollection, pastel, 10 x 20 inches, 2000.  "I flew 3000 miles for this ?...

Philip Koch, Recollection, oil on canvas, 36 x 72", 2000 Shortly after I started working seriously in soft pastels my wife and I took a week's trip out to Northern California to work from the landscape in Marin County. The work that resulted was good but something of a struggle for me to pull off working out on location. In short, for someone who grew up back East, the West Coast always looks a little odd. Not that it isn't beautiful, it is and perhaps at its best too much so. But some part of me distrusts it as if what I am really seeing is a movie set. I worry my West Coast readers will be horrified by my confession- perhaps I'm not as open to new experiences as I like to think. One other problem for West Coast landscape painter (and again this is guaranteed to enrage somebody)- almost all the top landscape artists stayed back East and used it as the subject of their best work. As a modernist who relates to the 19th & early 20th century tradition of landscape pa...

Philip Koch, Pamet River, oil on panel, 7 x 10 1/2", 2008 In the studio I believe in tough love. I have a special windowless room where paintings who have refused to come together to my satisfaction are sent. It's dark and cheerless, and no conjugal visits are allowed. My paintings, with a tremble in their voice, call it "the Banishment Room." Some never make it out alive.  This oil was begun years back in the early '90's on location on Cape Cod, looking just south of the mouth of the little Pamet River. Edward Hopper's studio is just a little bit over the dunes in the background. I did this during one of my  residencies in his studio. At the time I began the painting, I was "under the spell"  of Hopper's vision quite a bit. This meant interest in the details of human intervention in the landscape, so I included small beached sailboats that were in the foreground and a long spindly dock. My color choices were constrained to close approximati...

Philip Koch, Sea Moon, pastel and vine charcoal, 5 x 7 1/2" 2009 My wife just came back from her annual professional conference. She is a psychiatric nurse who runs a day hospital program at a big local hospital. Patients normally come to her shortly after a suicide attempt. Her program is widely respected as one of the best.  One of her secrets is she really works at making it better and puts in incredibly long  hours. But picking her up at the airport after her return flight I saw immediately a twinkle in her eye that usually signifies she's fired up. She launched in excitedly telling me she'd just figured out how to solve some thorny problems she's been having with her program. She was confident she was onto something. Getting away from her routine and talking shop with new therapists always does this to her. I worked for over 25 years pretty strictly as a plein air painter- a way of working I love. But a persistent problem was color. Despite what people think about...