Philip Koch Paintings

I had a fascinating week. It all revolves around my family's involvement with color. Turns out there's more of a history than I knew. Above is one of the main galleries in the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) in Rochester, NY, my old hometown. They sent me payment for the two drawings of mine they just purchased for their Permanent Collection. Inspired by that, I was perusing their website and ran across a new Gallery Buzz  blog post  by Lucy Harper, the Art Librarian and Webmaster at MAG that stopped me in my tracks. It explained that in the fall of 1914, Kodak decided to debut their then revolutionary new Kodachrome two color process film, the first commercially available color film, with an exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery. My maternal grandfather, John Capstaff, was the inventor of this film, long a point of pride in my family. But nobody in my family seems to have known of the Museum's exhibit of my grandfather's photography, which seems strange to me. H...

Philip Koch, Moon Dance, vine charcoal, 8 x 10", 2009 There are two reasons I avoid photography. I'll start with the real reason. My father worked for Eastman Kodak as an optical physicist. For the entire time I knew him he was doing work for the US military that was classified. And he never once told anyone in the family what the work was beyond that it involved light and lenses. I couldn't help but notice that my dad didn't seem to like his job very much as he came home in a dark mood almost every night. In his defense, he was a very kind man and, despite his troubles with depression, his affection for me was apparent. And it meant the world to me. Still, using the logic of a child, I concluded that cameras and lenses must be bad for you. My mother's dad also worked for Eastman Kodak and was early on very prominent in the company, being the inventor of the original Kodachrome color film process. He had fallen in love with his secretary at Kodak. When she became p...