Philip Koch Paintings

  I'm just back from a wonderful trip up to Maine to paint and attend my opening for Isalos Fine Art's current show Inside Edward Hopper's World: Paintings by Philip Koch  (through Sept. 2 in Stonington, ME). One of the other highlights of the trip was my chance to visit the newly expanded Colby College Museum of Art  in Waterville. It received a big new gift of the Lunder Collection is now the largest art museum in Maine. It's worth a trip to see. Diana Tuite, who has just joined the Colby Museum as its new Katz Curator was kind enough to take time out of her schedule (she was right in the middle of moving to new home in Waterville) to come meet me and chat for awhile.  Diana was one of the people who organized the important exhibition Edward Hopper's Maine  at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the most extensive look ever taken at Hopper's long involvement with Maine as a subject for his work. Here's a few of my favorites from the C...

Here's the view of Isalos Fine Art 's new exhibition of my paintings of Edward Hopper's studio in S. Truro, Massachusetts and of his boyhood home in Nyack, New York. The show's opening reception was crowded and enthusiastic. I got some new collectors and had fun talking with a lot of new people about my work, how Hopper was my greatest teacher, and about Hopper's critical relationship with his surroundings where he lived and painted. You can view all the work in the exhibit on the Isalos website. Following is the feature article by Bob Keyes in the statewide  Sunday Telegram that ran on 8/11 filling the better part of the  front page of the paper's weekly culture section Audience. And continuing on page three. You can read the article here. Here is a view of the exhibit with my vine charcoal drawing Hopper's Beach, Looking North. It was drawn on location just below Hopper's Truro s...

Allison Malafronte wrote a wonderful background article yesterday about my upcoming show of Hopper-themed interiors in the online newsletter Fine Art Today  that is published by Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. Allison was for years the Senior Editor at American Artist magazine   before taking up the reins at Fine Art Today . The show is titled Inside Edward Hopper's World: Paintings by Philip Koch  and will be at Isalos Fine Art in Stonington, Maine. She makes interesting points in her introduction: Edward Hopper has been having a major posthumous moment in recent months, with his current "Hopper Drawing" exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art garnering rave reviews, a life-size re-creation of his 1939 "New York Movie" painting taking center stage at Laguna Beach's famous Pageant of the Masters, and several of his works selling well above their estimated value at important auctions. It's not surprising that so many continue to value and h...

Isalos Fine Art up in Stonington, Maine is opening a new show next week, Inside Edward Hopper's World: Paintings by Philip Koch. Michael Daugherty, who runs Isalos, wrote in the press release for the show about how the paintings document a little known side of the famous American realist painter  Hopper:  During 14 residencies, as well as time spent in the Nyack, New York house where Hopper lived until he was 30, Koch has inhabited the spaces in which Hopper lived. As Koch painted these spaces, he felt that he found clues to the inner life of the man, and expressed them in his own work. The paintings, pastels and charcoal drawings in this show are a small selection of many interiors and landscapes Koch has created over the years. You can download the catalogue that reproduces all 16 paintings to be included in the upcoming show free from a link on the gallery's website.   Here's a selection of some of the pages from the catalogue: Edward Hopper'...

Sun in an Empty Room II,  vine charcoal, 7 x 14", 2012 (drawn on location in Edward Hopper's boyhood bedroom in Nyack, NY) Vine charcoal is a medium known for its delicacy. But that fragility is something of a problem when it comes to moving such drawings. Until they're safely framed under glass you must handle them as if you're walking on eggshells. The drawing above   is in one of these crates below... ...along with 15 other paintings, pastels, and vine charcoal drawings look like when they're waiting to be picked up by the FedEx guy for their trip up for my solo exhibit at Isalos Fine Art in Stonington, Maine. None of the work for this upcoming show (Aug. 13 - Sept. 2, 2013) is particularly large, but since a half dozen of the pieces are works on paper framed under glass, they had to be wrapped generously in bubble wrap. The packaged pieces on paper like this get bulky pretty quickly. I'm determined to have the pieces arrive safely with...

The first four years of my life we lived a house with a sandbox in our backyard. It was a substantial wooden construction that my parents had replenished with new sand by the time I, the youngest of three, came along. Pulling my hands across the sand's soft surface delighted my tiny fingers. And best of all were the amazing patterns that magically emerged on the sand in my fingers' wake. In a funny way, that sandbox was my first art school. Humans have been "playing in the dirt" like that for our whole history. It's embedded in minds, this love of making simple shapes and patterns on a flat surface. Here above is an oil by Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997). In addition to being vividly colored, the painting shows some of that "sandbox playfulness" with the artist dragging his brush, scratching back over previously drawn shapes, wiping out and so on. Looked at as a design on a flat surface, the painting has a certain appeal. Also the woman's spac...

Events conspire, good events mind you, against serious blogging this week. Had a crew come in and paint my studio and home from top to bottom. It looks great, but there's been a lot of moving of paintings and equipment to allow it to happen. Time consuming, but the studio has never looked so fresh and inviting... My painting above, Deep Forest Pool, oil on panel, 32 x 40" is now hanging in the Annual Members Exhibition at the Academy Art Museum over in Easton, Maryland. It's a piece done entirely from imagination and memory of my boyhood in the northern forests. Last Sunday my wife Alice and I drove over to hear Peter Trippi, Editor of Fine Art Connoisseur   magazine, give a great talk and slide presentation on contemporary realist painting. He kindly included my own work in his talk.  That's Peter on the left below at the Academy Art Museum. For anyone interested in the links between historic realist painting and realist painting today I don't think you...