Philip Koch Paintings

The Birches of Maine , pastel, 10 x 8", 2008  I have a confession- I am a gym rat. Most days likely find me at the gym for an hour. Today was my friend Kim teaching Body Flow. For the uninitiated, it's sort of a combination of Yoga-lite and Tai Chi done in a darkly lit room to music. Kim, frighteningly buff, performs a choreographed series of moves to music from a spotlighted stage. The rest of the class follows her moves as best we can. It is hard as hell. Surprisingly it is also very beautiful. One moves slowly from one bending or twisting pose to another while trying your best not to topple over. And you push each move just a bit to make the gestures crisp, flowing, and the extensions of the limbs sharp and stated.  As the class progresses, your senses gradually wake up. Balance, gravity, and forceful yet delicate movement become amazingly tangible. It reminds me ever so much of what I do when I'm painting- making clear, stated gestures with the hand that holds the brus...

Sometimes we can pick out the significant pattern in the clutter of events. Other times we're not so lucky. One of my favorite places to paint is Cape Cod, and Truro out near the way end is particularly rich in possibilities. Partly it is the Edward Hopper art history there. Running right through the middle is the Pamet River, itself one of Hopper's favorite motifs. Except for Truro Harbor itself, I had had little luck finding other places along the river to paint. Usually the problem was the spaces were too crowded, with foreground, middle ground and background all clamoring for my eye's attention.  A few years ago I was staying in the Hopper studio and woke up early to paint only to find everything covered by dense fog. Nonetheless I packed up my charcoals and headed out. Once at the river I was delighted- the fog had pared down the selection by totally obscuring the far shores of the river. It just wasn't there. Here's the resulting drawing. And here is the oil o...

Think of late afternoon sunlight and I immediately think Edward Hopper.  Years ago it was seeing the poetry in his long shadows that convinced me I had to change from painting my early abstractions. I wanted a world with the dazzle of bright highlights and deep luminous shadows. Edward Hopper's oil painting  The Camel's Hump  (image courtesy Art Renewal Center) features a distinctive pyramid-like sand dune that for decades was a landmark in S. Truro on the shore Cape Cod Bay. The road in the foreground is the driveway to Hopper's studio and he positioned himself to look south towards the memorable dune. When I was first invited to go and stay in Hopper's studio way back in 1983 I was eager to try a painting from this same vantage point. I got there and guess what- no Camel's Hump.  The owners of the studio later told me about what had happened. Apparently someone bought the adjoining land and planned to build a house right where the Camel's Hump stood. He even h...

I was talking with Ekaterina, the lifeguard at the pool yesterday. Don't know how we got on the topic but she said as far as she was concerned "the past is the past- I'm done with it." Now she's maybe 20 or 21. Me I don't have this problem. The past, the present, what's up around the bend- it's all mixed up in my head like I'm swimming through a bowl of thick soup. The above painting is a case in point.  I grew up on the shore of Lake Ontario just outside Rochester, NY. Especially in the winter it was magical. My childhood friend Bob Wetmore used to keep his little Sunfish sailboat in a creek that flowed north and emptied out into Lake Ontario. For some reason that memory of this protected little creek always stuck in my mind- perhaps I was touched by its seeming safety compared to the wide open and often wildly rough Lake Ontario. Got a notion in my head to do a painting about winter a few years ago and started scribbling thumbnails in my sketchbo...

There is a field outside one of the ATM's I sometimes  use. Every time I go there my eye is caught and held by a stand of tall pines in the distance. Often they sway gently as they are raked by the wind. This went on for years until I took the hint and did a drawing of the place. Above is Harp of the Winds , vine charcoal and pastel, 9 x 9". Making the drawing felt right, as if I'd pulled the trees to myself and made them my own. Not surprisingly, this group of trees ended up completing the foreground of one of my large studio oils not too much later.  One would think in painting that inventing trees out of one's imagination shouldn't be that hard. Just try it. Likely as not one ends up with foliage that looks more like wilted broccoli than oaks or pines. Making drawings is it a way to engage more of your mind in grasping the essentials in what you've discovered out there in the world. It is a way to wake oneself up enough to really  see.   Is drawing better th...

The Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, MA is hosting the national touring exhibition of my work Unbroken Thread: The Art of Philip Koch through August 16th in its largest and beautifully skylit gallery space. The Museum has done a beautiful job with the exhibition. The show reveals the on-going link between the American landscape painting tradition and the paintings of this modernist-influenced artist. It is particularly appropriate that the show appear on Cape Cod as in many  ways this was where I became a mature painter. It think it was in struggling to paint the strange colors of its white sand and stubby pine forests that I came into my own. Years before in 1970 as I was entering my graduate painting program at Indiana University I was painting like an over-eager young dog chasing every squirrel at the same time. I had only recently stopped painting abstract imitations of Mark Rothko and Frank Stella's work. My discovering Edward Hopper's paintings in art books had put some ...

Drove to Rockland County just north of New York City yesterday to visit family and came back home today. As we'd hit horrendous traffic driving north it wasn't hard to persuade my wife and daughter to take the indirect scenic route home this afternoon.  We headed west through New Jersey's much underrated mountain region to the Delaware Water Gap. Here the upper Delaware River cut its way through the mountains and left an amazing geologic creation for us. My wife Alice had gone to summer camp there for years as a girl and she was obviously lost in time and space as we explored the river and forests. It was fabulous. When I was just discovering 19th century American landscape painting I learned of the Water Gap through the often reproduced depiction on it by the 2nd generation Hudson River School painter George Inness.  Above is one of Inness's Water Gap oils (courtesy Art Renewal Center). Pushing on we headed through Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. Intermittent rain...