Philip Koch Paintings

Hopper In 2006 I first visited Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine. The small island has earned a special place in American art history from  the steady stream of artists who followed the advice of their charismatic teacher Robert Henri to go there and paint. Two of the best to take the advice were Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent. Both spent important time early in the 20th century painting on the island. The commanding promontory Blackhead that stretches eastward out into the Atlantic inspired both of them make repeated paintings of it. Hopper The first four images are all small oil studies Hopper made of Blackhead. The final four paintings are by Hopper's art school classmate Rockwell Kent. Though the temperament of their paintings differ, what the two shared was an almost obsessive willingness to create painting after painting of a motif that obviously fascinated them. There's a sort of driving youthful energy to their engagement with Blackhead....

  I'm just back from a wonderful trip up to Maine to paint and attend my opening for Isalos Fine Art's current show Inside Edward Hopper's World: Paintings by Philip Koch  (through Sept. 2 in Stonington, ME). One of the other highlights of the trip was my chance to visit the newly expanded Colby College Museum of Art  in Waterville. It received a big new gift of the Lunder Collection is now the largest art museum in Maine. It's worth a trip to see. Diana Tuite, who has just joined the Colby Museum as its new Katz Curator was kind enough to take time out of her schedule (she was right in the middle of moving to new home in Waterville) to come meet me and chat for awhile.  Diana was one of the people who organized the important exhibition Edward Hopper's Maine  at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the most extensive look ever taken at Hopper's long involvement with Maine as a subject for his work. Here's a few of my favorites from the C...

Some images just stick with you. This one's got me. When I was just turning four my family moved to a house on the shore of Lake Ontario, some miles outside of Rochester, NY. There were few other houses around and not too many other kids to play with so much of the time we made our own fun. One of my clearest memories were the huge fires my sister and I would make from the driftwood we'd collect along the rock covered shore.  With no other lights visible, the night sky was pure ink black. Part pyromaniac, I used to love to make the biggest fires  possible. Like the one in Rockwell Kent's   engraving Flame above, the fires would spit out sparks that would be carried upwards by the heat to disappear among the stars. Looking at Kent's reclining man, I know Kent loved following those upward paths of his fires' sparks too.  Fire of course when you watch it flicker and burn seems to have a living quality. And in the hands of Rockwell Kent it becomes an ama...

Yesterday my wife Alice and I drove down to Washington, DC to the National Gallery of Art to see their huge George Bellows (American 1882 - 1925) show of paintings (through Oct. 8, 2012).  Bellows was a school mate of two of my favorite artists- Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent (both also born in 1882- obviously a great year to grow new artists) at the New York School of Art. All three showed a marked influence from their teacher, the charismatic Robert Henri, whose work was characterized by rapid execution with large brushes and a high sense of pictorial drama. Kent and Hopper gradually moved more away from Henri's style and vision as the years went by, but Bellows seemed to find a more comfortable fit  and stayed with the swashbuckling application.  I've always been a fan of Bellows' paintings but was still surprised at how much impact most of his work had. Some of my favorites were his early landscapes from New York done along the Hudson River and the East ...

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...

I sometimes wonder if I'd have become a landscape painter had it not been for winter. When I was a kid growing up along the shore of Lake Ontario just outside of Rochester, NY, we used to get tons of snow. I know as one of my jobs was shoveling our long driveway. Maybe we always dream about our childhoods. I sure do, and often the dreams revolve around my old home in deep winter.  There's often the complaint that winter isn't as colorful as summertime. For the life of me I don't know what people are talking about when they say that, as I've always felt just the opposite. Snow blanketing the landscape turns all these amazing shades of blue, violet, cream yellow, absolute stark white, and a zillion shades of grey. And there is ALWAYS super high contrast of darks and lights. Above is a Rockwell Kent that's new to me, with what strikes me as an odd combination of a more naturalistic foreground and a sky much more invented and surreal. In fact I almost wonder if ...

Here's the entrance to Saginaw Art Museum's current exhibit of my paintings.  Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch  (through Feb. 19, 2012). The photo is taken from the beautiful glass enclosed walkway that leads from the Museum's original 19th century Mansion house to one of its new wings. Below I've turned around and photographed the doorway to the walkway currently full of handsome metal sculptures by David Holtslander. At the right is my oil  The Voyage of Memory , a piece inspired by the 19th century American painter Thomas Cole's series of four paintings,  The Voyage of Life  (I had the pleasure of seeing them again just last weekend down at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.). At the left is my oil  Otter Cove , which I'll return to later. Below is me posing with an oil by another of my early favorite artists, the American John F. Kensett. It's  Study for the Lakes of Killarny ,   that Kensett painted in 1856 while on...