Philip Koch Paintings

On Sunday afternoon May 4 I've been invited by the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, NY to give a short talk on the legacy of Hopper's vision. The talk will take place in Hopper's boyhood home, upstairs in the bedroom where he was born and lived until he was nearly 30. Years before Hopper, previous generations of the American Hudson River School artists painted often literally in Hopper's neighborhood. The profoundly divergent ways Hopper and his predecessors chose to compose pictorial space is fascinating. Above is Hopper's oil Gloucester Harbor,  teaming with activity. It's a view that highlights some of the key ingredients of Hopper's artistic vision- an elevated viewpoint, dramatic and even jarring juxtapositions, and generally a preference for forms that are close in to the viewer. By contrast, here's an oil by the 19th century American painter Sanford Gifford of the Palisades, the dramatic stretch of towering cliffs l...

On Sunday, May 4 I'm going to be giving a short talk on the legacy of Edward Hopper as part of the Edward Hopper House Art Center's Spring Gala, At Home with Edward and Jo Hopper. On display in the Center's galleries will be some rarely seen works by the painter Jo Hopper, Edward's wife. Along with short presentations on Hopper, music, lite fare, and a silent auction. The event is a fundraiser to support what is probably one of the most remarkable homes in the country open to the public. If you want to feel American art history, this is the place. For more information on this ticketed event click here. Above is an oil painting Edward Hopper made of his boyhood home in Nyack, NY (now the Edward Hopper House Art Center). He lived there with only a few interruptions until he was nearly 30. The memory of the Nyack home remained deeply rooted in him. Of all his paintings this is the one that most closely resembles the way the place actually looks.  It's a view...

Last June I visited the Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, NY. Their new Director, Stephanie Wiles very kindly had given me a private tour. It was so impressive that two weeks ago I took my wife Alice to see it. Their I.M. Pei designed facility is unusual for an art museum, taking the form of a commanding tower overlooking the low mountains of the southern Finger Lakes of New York State. Great sweeping spaces where I spent much of my youth. One Dutch Baroque painting in particular caught my eye, Diana and Actaeon , labeled simply Utrecht School, Circle of Jan van Bijlert, circa 1660. In it Actaeon, a young and very mortal hunter stumbles across the Goddess Diana, who is bathing in a forest stream accompanied by her retinue of nymphs. Famously chaste and easily offended by the young man's intrusion, she splashes him with water, turning him into a deer. Frightened, Actaeon runs off only to be tracked  down by his own hounds and killed by his fellow hunters who don't reali...

Last week my wife and I were touring art museums in Western New York State.  After a wonderful visit to the Burchfield Penny Art Center in Buffalo,  we got the idea that Niagara Falls   would be beautiful in winter.  It was, but within 15 seconds of our reaching the railing at the top of the Falls, the wind shifted and blew the ever present cloud of spray all over us. This might feel great in the heat of August. On a day with gale force winds and temps in the teens, it was painful.  We regrouped and instead set out to visit my old hometown art museum, the Memorial Art Gallery  (MAG) in Rochester. For a museum in a medium sized city it has an amazingly strong Permanent Collection (and I am completely unbiased about this, despite MAG having purchased two of my drawings in 2012). Here's Alice standing next to one of her favorites. Thomas Hart Benton (Am. 1889 - 1975) Boomtown, oil, 1928 It's a large painting so I had to step bac...

This is Part II of the short essay I wrote inspired by my visit to the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY last Friday... Burchfield came of age as a painter in a time when artists had the winds of modernism at their backs. They delighted in re-emphasizing the beauty of mark making on the surface of the canvas in elegant patterns. Burchfield to me took the best from the modernist toolbag and reinterpreted the tradition of American nature painting through 20th century eyes. And he was frighteningly good at it.     Charles Burchfield,  Early Spring,  watercolor, 37 1/8 x 42 1/4"    1966-67 His  Early Spring  strikes me as both felicitous and at the same time a solemn reflection on the difficult passage from winter to spring. At first the golds in the fields and in the budding trees strike the viewer. But looking longer one sees all this warmth sits atop a deeper layer of silvery cold grays and blue blacks. I think the sha...

This is the Burchfield Penney Art Center (BPAC) in Buffalo, New York. I visited it last Friday for the second time this year. It's a special place for me for two reasons. It has the largest collection of works by Charles Burchfield (Am. 1893 - 1967) one of the artists who has most influenced me. Secondly it sits literally a few hundred yards from the spot where 48 years ago I decided to become an artist. Back in high school I had my life all planned out, or so I thought. Following the family pattern I would become an historian or a sociologist. But half way through my first semester at Oberlin College in Ohio I was miserable with my courses in my intended major and felt gloomily confused. I was the proverbial apple waiting to fall. At my first Thanksgiving break from Oberlin I traveled home on the Greyhound Bus to Rochester, stopping half way to spend the night with my old high school friend Steve at Buffalo State College. Steve and his new girlfriend invited me and t...

Philip Koch,  Deep Forest Pool, oil on panel, 30 x 40", 2011 A lot of my paintings are based on memory, sometimes of a place, other times of just the feeling that a place installed in me.  A painting is never just what is seems. It comes with baggage, but often of the very best sort. After a few years as an abstract painter when I first started out I became intrigued with the 19th century painters who loved the landscape. John Constable and George Inness were two of the biggest stars to me then and I would consciously look for places in nature that reminded me of the sorts of things they liked to paint. But my own direct experiences played their role too. I was thinking about my love of painting ponds and tiny lakes that are surrounded by deep forests, something I have been drawn to for years. Years ago one afternoon I felt grabbed my nature's mysterious power. It wasn't a dramatic thunderstorm or anything like that, actually the opposite, something th...