Philip Koch Paintings

Philip Koch, Passage IV, oil on panel, 18 x 24", 2006 Last week I spent the biggest part of each day painting in what felt like the middle of nowhere (Acadia National Park and Deer Isle in Maine). It is as vivid a hit of nature as one can get on the east coast of the US. This has a way of shaking up you up, very pleasantly too. Thoughts of receipts piled on my messy desk and upcoming committee meetings fall away leaving one feeling they've just awakened into a different world. At such time the thought " This is where we came from" cycles through my mind. Our earth is some four and a half billion years old. Relatively quickly it spawned simple forms of life. With luck and time these evolved into the plants and animals we see today. It's one heck of a story when you think about it. We humans in a real sense are the eyes and ears through which our mother planet can consider herself. We visual artists have to take care of the "eyes" part. Turn on the TV...

Philip Koch, First Light:Deer Isle, vine charcoal, 7 x 14" 2009 Above is the view from the Pilgrim's Inn where we stayed last week in the tiny village of Deer Isle, Maine. The Inn itself is beautiful but can't hold a candle to its setting on Mill Pond. I arose before dawn one morning and was set up with my easel as the first rays of the sun hit the far shore. Except for the fishermen, no one else is ever around at a time like this. So often the angle of the earliest light combines with the previous night's mist to create something that looks as if it was as if out of a dream. We'll be going back to Deer Isle I am sure for more painting. When I first arrived and unpacked I realized to my horror I'd left my box of vine charcoal back in my studio in Baltimore. Fortunately we were able to grab a computer and locate an art supply store in Ellsworth, a good hour away. This did nothing to improve my mood, but we blasted off to reach the place just minutes before closi...

Philip Koch Mt. Desert: Two Islands, vine charcoal, 7 x 14", 2009 Above is one of the many vine charcoal drawings I was able to do last week when painting up in Maine. It is from a pond one passes shortly after crossing over the bridge from the mainland. I painted here way back on my honeymoon in 1982 and again several years after that. And now once again, but many years later I came back for another crack at it. Why? Well, the place sticks in my mind. Can't really say why but when I think about the location I find myself wondering what it looks like right now. Are the three ducks I scared off when I drove up Tuesday morning still there as they were the each time I visited this last week. Are they the owners? It doesn't really matter why I'm attracted to the place. It is enough that it stirs up my imagination and has provided me material to compose drawings with a way higher than usual batting average. It is a little like bay a mile from my home where I spent some of ...

This is my easel at 7:30 this morning atop Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in Maine. As you can see the place is deserted. Funny thing about that is just a half hour before there were probably a hundred people there in the space of five minutes. All of them were there with cameras to snap a photo of the sunrise and then take off again. It was amazing in its spectacle (not the sunrise, the speed people were traveling). I'll have some more to say about this tomorrow, but right now I'm tired after a long day of traveling (including perhaps the fastest run through of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, ME in recorded history). Suffice it to say the painting trip was great- lots of good weather and strong new work resulted. I'm back home and need to call it a night. Will post some more images tomorrow.

Philip Koch, Arcadia II, oil on canvas, 30 x 40", 2008 This is a painting I'm very fond of- enough so I've tried out several variations exploring different chords of color for earth and sky. It is entirely done from my imagination, though none of it would have happened without Acadia National Park in Maine on Mt. Desert Island. Alice and I honeymooned there back in 1982 in early May (to our surprise we were greeted then by pockets of snow still clinging stubbornly to the shadows at the summit of Cadillac Mountain ). It's the highest spot on the East Coast, and I think my favorite place on the planet. It inspired many of America's finest landscape painters since the 19th century, among them Sanford Gifford and Frederick Church. We're headed back there again tomorrow for a week of painting. Nowadays I do most of my painting from memory and from plein air vine charcoal drawings, though for 30 plus years before that I was a hard-core perceptual painter. Arcadia II ...

Philip Koch, Penobscot Bay, vine charcoal, 9 x 12", 1998 Pictorial Unity . Such a dreadful, anemic sounding phrase my eyes are starting to glaze over just hearing it. It is murder to put into words exactly what it is artist do when they paint or draw well. The reality behind the phrase pictorial unity though is red-hot with meaning. Any successful art piece marshalls its forces like a team of horses to pull the wagon in the same direction. I was looking at the latest Art in America magazine this morning had to wince. More than a few of the paintings, installations, etc. they reproduced tended to visually fall apart. To use a popular phrase, it's a pandemic. Attention artists! The pieces in your work are supposed to engage each other in a meaningful conversation, not ignore each other or try to out shout each other. Why is this so? It's because life itself so often is a fractured experience that humans are drawn to art and music in the first place. We have the chaos part ...

Philip Koch, Truro Studio Bedroom vine charcoal, 13 x 6 1/2", 2006 Call me Noah. Had a flood in my basement several weeks ago. I store lots of paintings and art supplies down there. Fortunately I didn't lose a singe piece, partly because I had built racks to get everything up off the floor and partly because it's a walk out basement so the water starts to drain before it gets really deep. Now the whole basement is being re-done by an energetic if noisy crew, so I had to drag everything upstairs for a few weeks. Every room in my house looks like you're peering into the attic of someone's mad aunt Florence. Funny thing is I'm loving it. Anticipating moving artwork back into the re-done basement I'm reviewing my work, in many cases for the first time in years. It's a perfect chance to eliminate some pieces that just aren't my best. And I have found a few pieces that after the interval of years don't interest my eye enough to save. But the stronges...