Philip Koch Paintings

The inner courtyard of the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian in  Washington, DC Last weekend I traveled to Washington, DC to teach a drawing workshop in the Freer Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian Institution. Just reopened after a two year renovation, the museum is incredibly elegant.  Grace Murray, the museum's Head of Public Programs,  and her interns did a wonderful job organizing the workshop so we could get a lot done in just three hours. Grace began the afternoon with a slide show  introduction to the museum and its collection- a highly unusual mix of Asian art and a small select group late 19th century American painters. Afterwards we worked in vine charcoal to make a quick study of Edward Hopper's composition. Then we headed out to draw the interior spaces in the museum galleries. The dozen students seemed like they had a great time. Winslow Homer,  Early Evening ,  oil on canvas, 1881-1907 While I didn't have a lot of ...

Philip Koch, Recollection, oil on canvas, 36 x 72 inches, 2000. This painting is based on the pastel drawing below. Funny story about this large painting. It's based on a pastel that in turn was made from an an on-site vine charcoal drawing. At certain times in my career I found working in stages like this allowed me to be playfully creative with color. My wife Alice and I were on one of our painting excursions, flying from Baltimore to Northern California. Once there I was taken by the sweeping panorama of San Francisco Bay from the summit of Mount Tamalpais just north of the city. We had crystal clear weather. With such a good viewpoint I grabbed my vine charcoals and set to work on a view of the Bay. Then the legendary fog of San Francisco rolled in like a freight train. In five minutes my subject was completely erased from view.   Philip Koch, Recollection, pastel, 10 x 20 inches, 2000.  "I flew 3000 miles for this ?...

Philip Koch, Red River , vine charcoal, 7 x 10 1/2, 2001 In 2001, just as soon as airplanes were allowed to fly again after the 9/11 attacks, I hopped on a flight to North Dakota. Entering the terminal in Fargo one was greeted by soldiers in camouflage uniforms holding automatic weapons (it looked like a paranoid scene out of The Handmaid's Tale ). Philip Koch, Red River Trilogy #1,  pastel, 4 1/2 x 6 3/4 inches, 2001 That Fall the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks was featuring a large painting of mine in their annual gala exhibition. My dad spent the first 4 years of his life in Grand Forks. He was by far my more nurturing and supportive parent. I only knew him for my first 12 years. I'd always wanted to visit his hometown, feeling it would be a way to connect with his memory. Going to this Museum exhibition was my chance to make the trip.  Philip Koch,  Red River Trilogy #2,  pastel, 4 1/2 x 6 3/4 inches, 2001 ...

Philip Koch working in his Baltimore studio on his painting Evergreen , 40 x 60 inches, that will be included in Burchfield Penney Art Center's exhibition of his work April 13 - July 29, 2018 I wrote the following about the remarkable experience I had in the two years I served as the Artist in Residence at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in 2015-17. Right now I am bus preparing for that museum's exhibition of my paintings and drawings from the Residency- it's set to open April 13 and run through July 29, 2018.  Time Travel in the Burchfield Archives We all think we know who we are. Sometimes an unexpected event shows us how wide of the mark our thinking has been. So it was with my experience the last two years being the Artist in Residence at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. It provided a close encounter with the work of another painter, Charles Burchfield. Burchfield, a fellow landscape painter, was an artist with a powerful imagination that h...

The front of Allen Memorial Art Museum. The inscription reads: "The Cause of Art is the Cause of the People." I always loved that. Sometimes an art museum changes the course of one's life. For the first time in 23 years I flew back to my alma mater, Oberlin College in Ohio to visit my first home as an artist, the Allen Memorial Art Museum . I arrived on campus as an awkward 18 year old freshman  intending to major in Sociology. Yet I found myself returning to the Art Museum with increasing frequency as the semester progressed. The lure of the Museum's exhibits became too strong to resist. By November of my first semester I switched to majoring in Studio Art. Philip Koch with the Dutch painter Hendrick ter Brugghen's  oil  St. Sebastian Tended by Irene , 1625 Andria Derstine, Allen's Director, generously gave me a good part of her day, touring the Museum with me and filling me in on changes since my time on campus. I asked her to ...

I took the picture above in Nyack, NY last Friday of the last rays of the sun hitting the home the painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) grew up in. I've been fortunate to visit many many times over the years and even to set up my easel and paint its interior. As luck would have it I was there on a cloudless and brilliantly sunny late afternoon- what I often call "Hopper light." So often it is the theme of loneliness or alienation people find in his paintings.  Yet to me Hopper's greatest achievement is his celebrating intense and vividly alive sunlight. To me nobody did it better.  Hopper's bedroom- the room where he was born. Two of its windows overlook the Hudson River, one block away. The home where Hopper lived on and off until he was 30 is now the  Edward Hopper House Art Center . If you're a Hopper lover, you need to go. So much of what Hopper was to become stems from his years in the house and its immediate neighborhood.  ...