Philip Koch Paintings

Charles Burchfield, The Big Tree , watercolor, circa 1920, Portland Museum of Art (Maine).  A few days ago I was looking at the Portland Museum of Art 's website and came across this painting from early in Charles Burchfield's career. Erin Damon, the Museum's Assistant Registrar, told me the Museum purchased the piece in 1998. Well, they got a really nice one! The giant tree seems not only alive, it  commands the surrounding  field.  It adeptly solves the challenges that come when an artist paints the colors of summer foliage. As commonplace as greens and yellow-greens are in that season, I know from my long experience as a landscape painter they're devilishly hard to make work in a painting. The way Burchfield tackles this teaches us a lot about the language of painting. Burchfield doesn't worry about color in the beginning. Color probably is the most delightful aspect in painting, but by itself it tends to be formless. It needs a...

Edward Hopper's Truro, MA studio, Sept. 2016 This week I brought some new paintings done from my most recent residency in Edward Hopper's Truro, MA studio into Somerville Manning Gallery in Greenville, DE. Two of the paintings are a actually a tribute to the very first Hopper painting I ever saw- his wonderfully strange oil of the corner of his painting room in the Truro studio (see below). It made a huge impression on me as a teenager and prodded me to begin thinking about becoming an artist myself. Philip Koch, Truro Afternoon , oil on panel, 14 x21 inches, 2017 (this one oil will be available at the Gallery Oct. 12). Philip Koch, Rooms by the Sea: September II, oil on canvas,  28 x 42 inches, 2017 Edward Hopper, Rooms by the Sea , oil on canvas, 1951, Yale University Art Gallery I've learned unexpected things over the years I've stayed and worked in Hopper's studio. One is that an artist has to conduct a wide-ra...

Philip Koch,  Thicket, oil on panel, 14 x 21 inches, 2017 Some of my new paintings go way back. This one actually started in 1982. Alice and I got married that year in the rain in our backyard with a female justice of the peace. Right after the ceremony we flew to Maine for our honeymoon.  I'd never been to Mount Desert but Alice had and she insisted I'd love it. Boy was s he right. Wandering in the woods near the Island's distinctive towering cliff named The Precipice I fell in love with this stand of young white birches. Worked from it for three afternoons and made a wonderful small oil. Later that summer I painted a large version of the composition in my studio. But before I had time to really enjoy either oil, the small version went to a collector and the large canvas entered the Permanent Collection of the Butler Institute of American Art.  Great as this was, I missed the paintings. Sometimes that happe...

Charles Burchfield, Sultry Moon, watercolor, 1959 Burchfield Penney Art Center's Facebook page is worth following. Every morning without fail they post a new painting by Charles Burchfield along with a selection of his writing from his journals. Seeing what they are offering up is one of the high points of my mornings. Sultry Moon  above was their pick this morning. It was new to me and as I looked at it the phrase "If plants could talk..." went through my mind. Burchfield is a very different kind of landscape painter than I am, but one thing I admire in his work is how remarkably  animated his forms are. Much of the energy he injects into his paintings is built out of his mastery of brushstrokes. This guy knew what he was doing.  Just to say two things about his mark-making: -You never know ahead of time what direction his brushstrokes are going to take as he paints his forms. Always he's surprising us. Unconsciously that makes us want...

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...