Philip Koch Paintings

     Philip Koch, Mountains by the Sea,  oil on canvas, 40 x 50 inches, 2019 Painting is about stirring our emotions. Once a museum visitor looking at one of my shows asked me if I only painted in the Fall. I was reminded of this as I gather together the paintings that will be in my solo show at Somerville Manning Gallery  next month.  I do opt for lots of oranges and reds when I'm choosing my paints. Actually I do a lot of my work outdoors when the greens of Spring and  Summer surround me.  But what I told that museum visitor was my paintings were about evoking how a scene makes me feel. There's a certain energy the intense light of the outdoors casts over a scene. Add to that a wind rustling the leaves and you feel almost like the world is softly vibrating.  Color choices in a landscape painting are about bringing the viewer closer to that  kind of experience .  I find if I push some of the color toward oranges and reds I get...

    Philip Koch, Inland II, oil on canvas, 45 x 60 inches, 2020 Paintings are about what fascinates us.  People often remark my paintings celebrate light and shadow. This began for me in an unusual way.  When I was very young my family lived in a deep forest on the northernmost border of the US. I confessed to my father I worried about getting lost. He smiled and told me I could find my way by studying the sunlight- that we lived so far north the shadows cast by the trees pretty much always pointed north. I was charmed by the idea and found it worked.  Now years later the idea that the light keeps us from getting lost seems an apt metaphor for living.   

Andria Derstine, the Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, OH sent out a holiday greeting yesterday and chose as an illustration an oil by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859- 1937),  Flight into Egypt.  I've always thought Tanner, an important African American painter, was too little known and was happy to hear my alma mater's art museum added one of his paintings for their collection in 2017. To me he's an impressive painter with supreme visual skills. Tanner was a religious man and depicted the Holy Family leaving Bethlehem in 15 paintings over his life time. Clearly this was a story the guy wanted to tell. His painting has a way of drawing you in whether or not you're traditionally religious. Painters tell their stories through how they shape things. Tanner first makes a crytalline sky that casts a mysterious atmosphere over the scene. Riding under a cloak of darkness we see the Holy Family with hardly a detail. But Tanner entices our eyes t...

Deep Forest Pool,  oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches, 2020. I grew up in the last remaining old growth forest in my county. To be honest in summer it could be a bit dark and solemn under all those trees. But peppered through the forest were small stands of white birch. Even on the cloudy days their bark shone out with delightful energy. No wonder that's a theme I so often return to in my paintings. Yesterday I hung two of my birch paintings alongside a decorative mirror.  Stepping back to look I saw the oils and mirror resonated with each other. Got to thinking about how they connect. We put a lot of stock in mirrors. There's the Disney film   where the evil queen relies on her mirror to tell her if she is still the fairest of them all. Even worse, in the 1930's classic, poor Dracula's image wouldn't even reflect in the mirror, apparently because he had no soul. In any case we all use mirrors to try to find out who we are.  Light in the Forest,  oil on...

Charles Burchfield, Telegraph Music, watercolor Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY We cheat ourselves out of meaningful experiences.  So often we're too quick to turn the page and move on. We overlook things that matter. A job of artists is to say "Not so fast, there's still something here you should see." Art helps to enlarge and to deepen our experience. I can't think of a better example of this than the painter Charles Burchfield, an artist who loved to leave the well traveled path and find subjects in the unlikely and unexpected places. The sounds of nature fired up his imagination.  Burchfield Penney Art Center has an exhibition organized by Curator Nancy Weekly on just this topic- Birdsong: Audio-visual  Art by Charles Burchfield , but it ends soon- Nov. 29, 2020. Here's a link to the museum's page on the exhibition. It's odd how birds, while so ever present when we walk outside are notable by their absence in most of American art histor...

  A few years ago one of our neighbors found a stray cat and brought it home. They named her Dawn. She was happy to be fed and petted by them which they did on a somewhat regular basis, but she stayed pretty thin. They also discovered she insisted on staying outside as much as possible. These neighbors abruptly moved away and left the cat behind. We were dismayed.  Dawn has made a few friends in the neighborhood and some of us started leaving food and water out for her.  Then we got a serious blast of winter wind and cold.  I couldn't stop thinking about Dawn spending her nights outside.  I have cat allergies or I would have attempted to bring her in to our house. Online I found an inexpensive electrically heated outdoor cat shelter. I bought it and set the thing up in our front yard. Dawn refused to have anything to do with it for the first two days, but the next morning I came home and found her furry behind sticking out of the shelter's door.  ...

Philip Koch, Cape Cod Morning, oil on canvas, 33 1/2 x 50 inches, 1994 The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art in Iowa is commemorating its 125 anniversary with a feature exhibition 125! 125 Masterworks from the Collection (through Jan. 17, 2021). Sean Ulmer, the museum's Director  let me know my painting Cape Cod Morning is included in the Masterworks  exhibition.  It's a huge honor to me to be hanging alongside some heavy hitters from the museum's permanent collection including Grant Wood, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Lucas Cranach the Elder. How my painting came to be is something of a "throw caution to the wind" tale.  On the main highway that runs the length of Cape Cod there's a particularly intriguing building that housed a bank. Back in  the '90's was painted a subtle yellow color I just loved. The trouble was I like to paint from direct observation rather than photographs, and the best point of view of the house was right in the middle of the busy hig...