Philip Koch Paintings

Charles Burchfield, The Constant Leaf , watercolor, 1960, Burchfield Penney Art Center What do you do as an artist when you're excited about the work of a really famous artist?  Should you start working in their style?   Over the last two years I've been serving as the Artist in Residence at the Burchfield Penney Art Center . I've held several thousand of his drawings from their Burchfield Archives in my hands and studied them for all they're worth. One can learn so much from absorbing the methods of the best who have gone before us- but it's tricky. detail from The Constant Leaf Probably it's Burchfield's unusual calligraphy-like details that first catches our eye, as in the detail above. It's an idiosyncratic handwriting he injects into all his work.  In the The Constant Leaf at the top the explosion of patterns in the foliage is a classic example. But a longer look at the painting I think reveals another side to Burchfield...

Yesterday my wife Alice and I drove up to see the two Andrew Wyeth shows near us at the Brandywine River Museum in Chads Ford, PA and the Somerville Manning Gallery in nearby Greenville, DE. The Brandywine Museum show, Andrew Wyeth in Retrospect , marks the 100th anniversary of Wyeth's birth. Audrey Lewis of the Brandywine Museum co-curated the exhibition, borrowing important Wyeth works from across the country. I was awed by what I saw. Wyeth has a quiet but insistent power to his imagination. He used "traditional" country and farm imagery but always found ways to show us the unexpected. For many viewers Wyeth's ability to render painstakingly detailed surfaces is the big takeaway. And impressive it is. For me though, as a realist painter who eschews minute details, what really struck me throughout the show was Wyeth's masterful sense of design- the way he realized expressive power by leaving things out.  The early watercolor Coming Storm ...

Edward Hopper, The Camel's Hump , oil on canvas, 1930 Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY. This painting was made the first summer Hopper spent on Cape Cod. He worked from the spot where four years later he would build the painting studio he would live  in for the next 30 years. It's my favorite Hopper  landscape Yesterday I was finishing a painting of a tree in a large painting I began last week. The session started out well. In my mind's eye I could see the tree looming magnificently above me in a brilliant morning light. Incredibly rich yet somehow elementally simple. As I pushed further, layering the brushstrokes to evoke the wonderful volume and intricate surface thousands of glistening leaves make. But it began to go wrong. The commanding personality of the tree melted away into an undistinguished mass of oily dots. An inner voice told me to put down my brush and get out of the studio before I made th...

Delaware Art Museum (DAM) in Wilmington, DE is organizing the first large scale exhibition in some years of the paintings of the famous Ashcan School artist John Sloan (Am. 1871-1951). The DAM has the larges collection of the artist's work and a significant Sloan archive.  Here's a large detail of one of the paintings the exhibition's Curator, Heather Campbell Coyle, is planning to include in the  show- Blonde Nude with Orange, Blue Couch  painted around 1917. I think it's one of Sloan's best examples of what he could do with color. He knew how to use it to enliven one of the most difficult subjects to paint- skin. Look at the shadows in the detail below. Determined to avoid monotony of color, Sloan carefully painted the shadows on the buttock and on the bottom knee with relatively cooler colors. Contrasting them, the woman's upper knee slides toward a warmer orange as our eye moves into that shadow. It works beautifully. Here's another...

Charles Burchfield, Yellow Afterglow, July 31 1916, watercolor, Burchfield Penney Art Center Buffalo, NY Every morning  Burchfield Penney Art Center (BPAC) does a great job of posting a different painting by Charles Burchfield on their Facebook page. They pair it with a selection from the many journals the artist kept throughout his life. This morning's post of the above painting particularly caught my eye. Done in 1916 when Burchfield was living in his family home, it is almost undoubtedly a view of the alley just west of his house at 867 E. 4th Street in Salem, OH.  A big part of Burchfield's talent was he knew to zero in on the subjects that most stimulated his creativity- the immediate surroundings of his boyhood home. It, and similar subjects, were to occupy him for the rest of his life. Two summer's ago at the urging of BPAC's Curators my wife and I drove from Baltimore to spend two days exploring Salem. Below is a major oil I made in my studio bas...

Here it is: At least once a day interrupt the usual mulling over of the details of your life and ask yourself "Of what is in front of me now, what is the thing my eyes most enjoy seeing." Then spend a focused moment enjoying it. That's it. Here below is something I stopped to enjoy- Philip Koch, White Thicket II, oil on canvas, 28 x 42 inches, currently in Courthouse Gallery Fine Art's show of my work running through July 21, 2017 in Ellsworth, Maine. So much of what is said or written about art (including by me) tends toward long-windedness. We can trip over all the words. It's good to boil it all down to just what's essential.

Charles Burchfield, drawing (undated)  panoramic view of  Gardenville, NY Catholic church steeple, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY Charles Burchfield's expressiveness grew out of his highly-trained eye.  I am convinced his life-long habit of making drawings, lots of them, sharpened his remarkable imagination. He knew his art depended on an empathetic responsiveness and a finely-tuned selectivity. By making drawings he strengthened these attributes. His 20,000+ drawings  at the  Burchfield Penney Art Center  (BPAC) attest to the seriousness he attached to his task. Philip Koch,   Gardenville, NY,  vine charcoal, 9 x 12 inches, 2015 This is the same church Burchfield drew in the illustration at the  beginning of this post. Ironically it was the fist artwork I made  when I began my Residency at BPAC. The vast majority of his drawings in the Archives are quick studies, often done in...