Philip Koch Paintings

Philip Koch, Charles Burchfield's Salem House, oil on panel 12 x 24", 2016 As part of my being the Artist In Residence at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY, I took a trip to Charles Burchfield's boyhood home in Salem, OH last summer. The home has been restored by volunteers as the Burchfield Homestead and is open for visitors in the warmer months. Burchfield lived on an unassuming residential street in this town southeast of Cleveland from age 5 until he was 28. He moved to Buffalo to take a job as a wallpaper designer and stayed there despite his growing national acclaim.  The above oil painting was done in my studio back in Baltimore. I based it on the vine charcoal drawing below that I made on location during last summer's trip to Salem. The view is standing in Burchfield's backyard with the low late afternoon sun streaming in from the west. Burchfield did many of his most famous early works looking out the windows of that house, fi...

Philip Koch, Upper Story: Sunlight,  pastel, 5 1/2 x 11", 2016 One of the best things about my serving as the Artist In Residence at the Burchfield Penney Art Center (BPAC) for this year is the opportunity to go and paint from some of the same areas Charles Burchfield used for his sources. I was up in Buffalo for the Residency last week.   I went to downtown Buffalo and worked from a building that  inspired one of his best known paintings, Rainy Night , below. Burchfield's painting to me is deliciously evocative of the moodiness of the city at night.  I did several drawings of the building, beginning by making a drawing of it sheltered from the January winds in the Public Library directly across the street.  Charles Burchfield, Rainy Night,  watercolor, 30 x 42", 1929-30 San Diego Museum of Art Overall I  did six drawing, including my pastel of the building's elaborate mansard roof in yellows at the beginning of this post ...

Philip Koch, Cape Cod Morning , oil on canvas 33 1/2 x 50" 1994 Katherine Kunau, the new Associate Curator at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art  (CMRA) in Iowa contacted me last week to tell me her Museum has my painting Cape Cod Morning  from their Permanent Collection hanging currently in their The Nation Travels -themed gallery. That sort of thing is sweet to hear. I had the good fortune to be invited to have my very first solo art museum exhibition at CRMA back in 1994, and this painting traveled to Iowa to be part of that. (CMRA by the way has amazing collections of Grant Wood and Marvin Cone paintings very worth seeing). There's a funny story behind my painting. For many years I have been traveling to the outer tip of Cape Cod, MA. It was here where for three decades Edward Hopper lived half of each year and painted many of his most memorable works. Hopper was the chief influence on me as a young artist to change from abstraction to becoming a reali...

My wife Alice and I went down to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. yesterday. Alice always wants to be sure to visit here favorite painting by Vermeer of a woman weighing pearls. Love the way the diagonal that runs through the painting is echoed by the angle of Alice's hair falling over her shoulder. It seems to link her to the careful balancing of the scales going on in the painting.  19th century artists took delight in studying the sky as in the  above landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. There are hardly any works by this mysterious German romantic in the U.S. I love the way the sky seems to come down and wrap its cool light around the distant mountain. Speaking of light from the sky, here's a Sanford Gifford oil where the sun struggles to burn through a silvery haze. It's a painting where the main story is the land's pinks and oranges elegantly dancing with the cool gray colors of the atmosphere.  Gifford's pai...

The holidays are a time to get together with good old friends. My wife Alice and I decided to drive down to Washington, DC to our favorite museum. The  Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) has an enormous and unrivaled permanent collection. We've visited it ever so many times that many of my "old friends" are to be found hanging on its walls.   They have the best angel painting ever, Abott Henderson Thayer's Stevenson Memorial. Can't help myself, just love that painting for how  it sounds its contemplative and slightly melancholy mood.  T hat's me soaking it up. Here's an old friend, Edward Hopper, who people never think of as a celebratory artist. Here's his  Ryder House, to me it's a stirring hymn to the brilliance of sunlight on a white wall. Its light seems to pulse with its own clear energy. Look at how the artist pushes the highlights on the sunlit grasses down way darker than the whites on the house. He kno...

Philip Koch oil copy of the left 1/3 of Charles  Burchfield's  Early Spring Sunlight  from 1950. I was documenting paintings in my studio this morning. Two pieces needed labeling that I made during my first two stays in Buffalo this year as the Artist in Residence at the Burchfield Penney Art Center  (BPAC). They were copies of my favorite sections of two of Charles Burchfield's watercolors from BPAC's Permanent Collection. My claim to fame is I am the only human ever to directly make copies of Burchfield watercolors in oils (I tell this tongue in cheek). It's a dreadfully old school thing to do.  Burchfield Penney Art Center indulged my whim. They were trusting enough to set up first Burchfield's Early Spring Sunlight (1950) and then his Early Spring  (1966-67) on an easel for several days each for me to examine them and copy from them. Charles Burchfield's Early Spring Sunlight  on BPAC's easel at left. At right K...

Philip Koch, Turret House, Nyack, oil on panel, 9 x 12, 2015 I have been traveling to Buffalo, NY frequently this year as the Artist In Residence at the Burchfield Penney Art Center . While there I go painting in the some of the locations where Charles Burchfield found subjects for his landscapes. Burchfield loved nothing better than studying his immediate surroundings. An unassuming neighbor's house or an empty field could inspire him to paint poetic and universal images.  Burchfield's example reminds me of his contemporary and friend Edward Hopper.  Like Burchfield, Hopper went looking for magic right in the old neighborhood.  Over Thanksgiving I returned to Nyack, NY the town where Hopper was born and lived until he was nearly 30. The area around the Hopper family home (now the Edward Hopper House Art Center ) is nestled along the banks of the Hudson River. Below is a house that particularly caught young Hopper's eye. It is on Loveta Place, four blocks...