Philip Koch Paintings

     John Sloan (American, 1871- 1951),  Green's Cats, oil, 1900,  Delaware Art Museum Earlier this week my wife Alice and I stopped in at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington.  As always happens when I visit there my eye was caught by one of the Museum's early oils by the famous Ashcan School painter John Sloan, Green's Cats.   Remarkable for its liveliness, the painting just nails the inimitable personality of felines. Quite an accomplishment when you consider it's almost completely devoid of any details.  Sloan has chosen a view where the cats have turned away, hiding from us their distinctive eyes and whiskers. Typical of cats, they seem oblivious to our presence.  To learn a painting's secrets I often like to turn it upside down.  It helps one see just how Sloan arranged his painting to make it express its "cat-ness" so powerfully.  For starters, Sloan expanded the scale of the two cats...

Edward Hopper, Rooms by the Sea, oil on canvas, Yale  University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT The first painting I ever paid attention to as a teenager was Edward Hopper's Rooms by the Sea . It was reproduced in a issue of  Time  magazine that I saw when I was about 15. Like a normal teenager I paid little mind to fine art. But the painting with its mysterious contrast of a door opening right into the sea stopped me in my tracks. I remember thinking "Now that's  a painting!"  In 1983 I had the good fortune to become friends with the owners of the studio in Truro, MA where Hopper made this painting. I began a long series of residencies in the studio and started my ongoing series of oil paintings of its interior. Here's the corner of his studio  that inspired Hopper's Rooms by the Sea. Hopper was a master at rearrangement. He moved the door from the left side the doorway to the right and lengthened the empty whi...

Philip Koch, Truro Studio: Two Rooms, oil on canvas, 36 x 48" 2016 My brush strokes are always in a hurry. When I paint my hand is doing more slashing and scrubbing than smoothing things down and polishing surfaces. One might get the idea my paintings happen  quickly. Ironically they don't. Rather I take months to sort through the colors to get them just the way I want them. Sometimes I need to build up my knowledge of a source for years before attempting a major painting. Above is one of my new oils. It shows Hopper's bedroom in the studio he designed and had built for himself in Truro, MA in 1934. At the left is one of the windows overlooking Cape Cod Bay, and through the door at the right stands his easel where he painted dozens of his world famous masterpieces.  My painting will make its debut Feb. 3, 2017 in Terre Haute, Indiana at Swope Art Museum' s exhibition Light and Shadow: Paintings and Drawings by Philip Koch from the Edward Hopper St...

Above is the 12 x 24" oil I painted from drawings I made on location at the house that Edward Hopper worked from for his famous oil Route 6, Eastham. Hopper made his painting based on drawings he made on the side of the road.  Route 6, Eastham is the keystone of the Swope Art Museum 's Permanent Collection and is one of Hopper's best known paintings. The Swope invited me to show my paintings that I've made of the interior of Hopper's Truro, MA studio during my residencies there and of the surrounding area in a show they are organizing, Light and Shadow: Paintings and Drawings by Philip Koch from the Edward Hopper Studio . The show will open Feb. 3 and run through March 25, 2017 in Terre Haute, Indiana. Here below is a view of my studio today with the new in-progress 60" wide version of my smaller oil well underway. Should be fun to see this hanging when it's completed in the same galleries in the Swope Museum with Hopper's famous oil. ...

Willard Metcalf, The Golden Carnival, oil on canvas, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY I've learned the most about making paintings that celebrate intense sunlight from Edward Hopper (1882-1967), who had to have painted the brightest sunlight of any of the early 20 century American artists. But Hopper was picking up on a tradition of the light-loving Impressionist artists who'd gone down the path before him.  Above is a landscape from my "first museum", Rochester's Memorial Art Gallery by my favorite of the American Impressionist painters, Willard Metcalf (1858-1925). It masterpiece of contrasting the warm ochres in the undulating hillside with the surprising cool blue-green hues in the water's reflections. It perfectly evokes the light of a late  afternoon just as the sun begins to speed up its descent to the horizon.  Metcalf, Winter Afternoon Metcalf's penetrating eye absolutely nailed brilliant sunlight, painting it with...

Philip Koch, Friday Morning, oil on canvas, 40 x 60", 1990. This was painted on Caves Road northwest of Baltimore, a place that strongly reminds me of the long driveway I would walk everyday to reach my school bus stop. It resonates with  feeling for me because of this. You may have noticed I haven't added a new post in several weeks. The Swope Art Museum in Terre Haute, IN is opening a major exhibition of my work in January. I've super excited about it and have been deeply involved with finishing paintings for that show. In the meantime here are some of my paintings from 1988-90. As a break from standing at my easel I've been looking at images from some of my paintings from decades back that have been recently scanned from their 35mm slides to digital format. Gradually a comprehensive archive of my work is emerging.  It is wonderful to see these older paintings again as they all long ago were added to collections all over the country. Philip...

This is Edward Hopper's 1930 watercolor of the Highland Light in North Truro, MA on Cape Cod. The painting is a masterpiece on a lot of levels. One thing I particularly love is how Hopper created a real drama of colors between his pale buildings and sky contrasting so sharply against the deep yellow ochres of his sun-drenched grasses. Hopper deftly included the sandy road in his foreground to break up what would have been a visually too empty field. By adding a note of less intense color in the bottom half of his painting he helps connect his foreground with the the painting's more pearly top half. I'll be including a slide of this watercolor of  Highland Light in the slide talk I am putting together for my event sponsored by Addison Art Gallery and the Truro Historical Society on Saturday, Sept. 24, 2016 at the Highland House Museum in Truro. There will be a showing of six of the oil paintings I've made during my 16 residencies in Hopper's former studi...