Philip Koch Paintings

Philip Koch, The Reach, oil on panel, 24 x 36", 2010 There's a half-sensed image that starts calling to you before you begin a new painting. It comes part from one's immediate experience and part from long buried memories that for reasons of their own have begun to stir again. Years ago during one of my stays at Edward Hopper's studio in Truro, MA, I walked south along his beach on Cape Cod Bay. There was an amazingly beautiful rhythm to the tops of the sand dunes and I wanted to see them close up. As I walked further I was startled to come across a seal that just died and now lay high up the beach where the high tide had deposited her. I say just died because she seemed perfectly intact, really more like she was sleeping than permanently still. What struck me was how beautiful she was, with a rich coat of multicolored fur and the most delicate eyelashes and whiskers. Though it was a brilliantly sunny afternoon, the stillness of the seal and the quiet of a deserted b...

This is a photo my daughter Susan just took on her phone of her daughter Nora getting her costume ready to go to a "Fairy Ball" themed party with her little friends. Nora is totally into this Cinderella type fantasy of silks, ribbons, shiny stars and magic wands. She's just turned four and there's been a remarkable transformation. She's suddenly infatuated with the romance of these new "girlie" sorts of themes. Figurines, stickers, castles... the works. She's having a ball. In a lot of ways, artists are really four year olds. We love nothing better than plunging into our private reveries and fantasies to see if they can be mined to make art. When I was exactly my grand daughter Nora's age, my family moved to a then remote forested hillside on the shore of Lake Ontario in New York State. To my young eyes, it seemed like we'd gone to live in some as yet undiscovered new world. It felt to me totally untamed and wild. At night I'd hear animal...

If you'd like to teach your children to hate the fine arts, I recommend taking them on a trip to one of the really big museums, say the National Gallery of Art or the Metropolitan Museum. Start in the galleries with the big bright splashy abstract paintings and sculpture and systematically work your way through all the galleries, going backwards in time until you hit the cases showing the fractured shards of Etruscan vases. If you find you've skipped any galleries, go back and hit them, as you don't want to miss anything. If you can arrange for one of your kids to be hungry, so much the better. Obviously, I'm talking about culture as a forced march activity. It cannot be that. While the huge museums have their place, I think you get a bigger bang for your buck at the smaller museums. Art after all, is about some things that are subtle and mysterious- rhythm, balance, flavor, mood. You absolutely can't take these things in with a shovel. One of the smaller museums ...

My wife and I went down to Washington, D.C. yesterday to visit the Phillips Collection, the lovely small museum in a residential neighborhood that bills itself as the first museum in the country dedicated to modern art. We were there to see their Georgia O'Keefe: Abstraction show up through May 9, 2010. It's a collaboration between the Phillips, the Whitney Museum, and the Georgia O'Keefe Museum, where my old friend Barbara Lynes is the Curator. The show is very good and I would highly recommend it to anyone. The Museum guards are told to not let visitors photograph work that isn't part of the Phillips' Permanent Collection, so I wasn't able to show you views of the O'Keefe show. But there is enough other stuff up that there's an embarrassment of riches. It's pretty hard to feel slighted. Above is probably the Phillips' most famous work, Luncheon of the Boating Party by Renoir. French impressionism has been so famous for so long that contempor...

Philip Koch, Edward Hopper's Rooms by the Sea, oil on canvas, 42 x 63" Above is a painting that's something of a love letter to the painting below by the famous American realist painter Edward Hopper. It's titled simply Rooms by the Sea and lives in the Yale University Art Gallery. When I was a teenager I saw this Hopper's oil reproduced in Time magazine and thought it was strange, but also pretty good. It was the first Hopper image I'd ever seen. Little did I know back then I had just met the man who would have the biggest single influence on my career as a painter. Hopper's painting is a fictionalized version of the corner of his painting room in the studio he had built for himself in 1934 out near the tip of Cape Cod in South Truro, MA. In a lot of ways its a hymn to the beauty of the sea and the famous Cape Cod light. My own painting is more naturalistic and is a bit more faithful to the actual arrangement of the doors, the sunlight, and the water. Co...

Here's an older painting of mine I've always liked a lot. It's The Roof , oil on canvas, 20 x 14" and was painted from life just down the road from my studio in Baltimore. I live in a very hilly section of town and love being able to look down on a roof top. The real engine of this painting is the contrast of warm and cool colors against each other. Obviously the big decision was that the architecture would be cooler than the foliage in the background. The forest in back acts like a giant trampoline that bounces your eye back to the front if you wander too far into the distance. The trick with color is that one has to see many colors at once, much like hearing chords in music. I wanted to keep the architecture always cooler than the leaves, but still vary its temperature vigorously. It's always a question of a color balancing act. Here's the large palatte in my painting studio that I bragged about in my last blog post. One of the secret weapon a painter can u...

Wanted to share the moment with you. I walked into my studio this morning and was struck at how beautiful the natural light streaming into the space was. Usually I don't show people my work until its done, but this is more a glimpse of the whole working environment. I spend a lot of time right here, standing in the same spot mixing colors in endless combinations. Painters get very fond of their tools. When the magic is working right, they become extensions of your hands and ultimately of your ideas. If you click on the photo you'll see it enlarged, revealing the lovely little row of fresh white oil pigments. They always remind me of Hershey's Kisses that came in a shape I decided was just perfect when I discovered them as a child. Here on my palatte they look ready and raring to go. As I do a fair number of large studio paintings, I store my pigments on the small palatte to the right and do the color mixing on the larger palatte to the left. It's a large masonite board...