Philip Koch Quoted in Whitney Museum's Hopper Drawing Exhibition Catalogue

 The Whitney Museum of American Art's  Hopper Drawing show opens today in New York (through October 6, 2013).

Carter Foster, the Museum's Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawing, writing in the opening paragraph of his exhibition catalogue essay includes a footnote concerning Hopper's oil Rooms by the Sea that quotes at length something I had written to him recently.

Foster writes: "Artist Philip Koch, who has spent time in the Hopper's former house making his own work, shared these illuminating thoughts about the difference between the painting and the views from and inside the house. 'A comparison of Hopper's inventive vision and the actual "facts" of the studio's architecture is revealing. Hopper's famous oil contrasts the open waves of Cape Cod Bay directly agains the doorway. To heighten the contrast, he places a big blast of sunlight on the empty wall and darkens down the water. It works beautifully.

But to get to this, he had to move the wooden dutch (sic) door to hinges on the opposite side of the doorframe. Then he widened the white wall. And best of all, he has the sunlight shining on a wall it never hits in reality. The view is looking south, and the empty wall faces due north.

In his most daring move, he eliminates the land between the studio and the water, lending the painting a delicious surreal quality. I used to wonder about this lovely but odd placement before I ever had visited the studio. But I found that when one sits in a chair at the far end of the studio away from the water (which is where Hopper usually placed his easel when he worked) that his viewpoint was low enough to the ground he would have seen the doorway seeming to lead directly out into the water. So the oddness of the painting's composition actually stems from something he saw. He just had the sense to take advantage of it.'"

The Conversation between Monet and Edward Hopper

Here's a painting I've always loved, Monet's oil Bathing at Grenoulliere from 1869. In it Monet seems transfixed by the ambient light that fills the partly shadowed foreground. It is so rhythmic I almost feel a little dizzy looking at it.

I first ran across it in 1971 when I was in my MFA program in painting at Indiana University. It was reproduced in one of the textbooks I read for an art history class on 19th century painting I took  

Monet was alive when Hopper lived in Paris and the two could have met (they didn't, at least not literally). But if you look at the some of the work the young Hopper was doing during his stays in Paris, you realize Hopper had indeed had long "conversations" with Monet's paintings. He intently studied the older painter's ideas. In particular, Hopper drank up the French Impressionist's sense of lightened overall tonalities and how he played them off against just a few dark accents. 

Here's Hopper's early oil Le Point Royal from 1909.

To me it always seemed Hopper is a profoundly color sensitive artist, an aspect that often gets lost in the usual comments about his work delving into themes of loneliness and isolation. Whether or not Hopper was painting solitude or bustling activity, he could find more different versions of a color to tell his story than you can shake a stick at. In his river painting above look at the range of color intensities he finds for his oranges. They range from almost neutral grays in the water to a dazzling ochre tinged warmth in the facade of the orange building. 

Hopper knew color as well as he did partly because he looked long and hard at the previous masters of color, people like Monet. 

In the fashion of Monet, Hopper's early work borrowed the broad handling and working his paint wet-into-wet. He did it very well in my opinion. In the States Hopper had studied with William Merit Chase and with Robert Henri, both of whom extolled using a big brush and moving quickly over the surface with a minimum of spelled out details. 

Funny thing about Hopper, and one of the things I personally find so fascinating about him, is how much he changed over the course of his long career. Here below is a watercolor from 1926, Adam's House.  There is still a heightened sense of brilliant light pulling the scene together, but what's new is the crispness of his forms, with lots of straight lines and sharper edges throughout the painting. In many ways it has moved away from his earlier dialogue with painters like Monet, but not entirely.

Beneath the surface, Hopper's still that French-inspired colorist. Look at how many different shades of white and off white he inserts into his light drenched foreground. I believe almost no one paints bright sunlight as well as Hopper. He achieves a richness of the bright light rather than something glaring or harsh. It's the range of color temperatures he manages to paint that both ramps up the power of the light and simultaneously softens its feeling. It's totally yummy.

A quick story about the above Hopper watercolor. While it's of a house in Glouscester, MA, the piece itself is in the Permanent Collection of the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas. I was at the end of my graduate school program in 1972 and was applying for college teaching jobs. I flew to Wichita to interview for a position at the state univerisity there. This was my first job interview ever and to say I was nervous is to put it mildly. One of the things the search committee was charged to do in addition to interviewing me was to sell me on living in Wichita, so they drove me around all the pretty parts of town and took me to the art museum. 

I was feeling stiff and completely self conscious as we all walked around the Museum together, so much so I don't remember their Collection other than that it was pretty good. Hopper's Adam's House, was the complete exception. I marched right up to it and just fell into it. As great art will, looking into its elegant pattern of sunlight and shadows sent a wave of calm and energy over me. Finally able to relax and invigorated,  I turned to my interviewers and announced I could see myself living happily in Wichita.

As it turned out they did offer me the job, though I ended up taking another offer at a college on the West Coast instead. But I never forgot that moment with Hopper's watercolor. Years later I would see it again in a big Hopper show back on the East Coast and made a point of reintroducing myself to it. It smiled back at me and said yes, it remembered our earlier meeting out in Kansas. Maybe great paintings are like elephants, they look you in the eye and seem to never forget you.

Carving out the space, Or Painting with a Mellonballer

When I was a kid I had chores. One that I liked was using one of those funny looking scoops to scrape out little balls of watermelon when we were making fruit salad. Watermelon was soft, and compared to say cantaloupe, the going was easy. Into the flat surface of a half watermelon you'd go and in a few minutes you'd have carved out a whole cave. To a kid with a good imagination, this was heaven.

I though of this years later when I read that George Seurat had described painting as "the carving out of space." It's more than just that of course, but it's intriguing that a painter who's so associated with elegantly composing his flat shapes and covering his canvas with intricate pointillist dots would choose to talk about carving out space. Depth for a painter has expressive purpose.

Here's a real celebration of deep space by the 19th century German artist Caspar David Friedrich.

Friedrich wants you to feel you can go somewhere and invites you to pick you way back into his far distance, stepping from mountain ridge to mountain ridge. As you go you see the land under your feet gradually changing, getting lighter and turning from a dark warm brown to a whispering faint light blue. 

Friedrich understood that space in a painting can have a deeply resonant emotional quality. 

Think for a moment of dream you've had where someone or something unsettling is pursuing you. As they or it comes closer you feel more anxious, as the distance between you widens, you feel relieved. Or the opposite. Imagine you're dreaming of someone you have missed terribly who unexpectedly reappears. They come closer and you're overjoyed. If they begin to drift away from you again the pain of loss is palpable. Evoking the feel of deep space unlocks a reservoir of feeling in the viewer. This is something landscape painters revel in.

Below is my painting North Passage, oil on canvas, 45 x 60", 2011. It's a composite of memories I pulled together from New England mountains, the coast of Maine, and Lake Champlain between New York and Vermont (why settle for one favorite place when you can borrow from them all). It's got more variety of forms in it than the Friedrich, but the same thinking is evident to make different spaces within it feel differently. 

Primarily it's done with color. The foreground water and islands are mid-toned and cool, a string of forest on the far shore is  injected with extremely light yellows and oranges. Then dramatically darker red mountains fill the next zone. Finally the sky divides into three basic levels- more subtle oranges in the closer clouds, a veil of overcast gray violets behind that, and most distant of all a streak of bright cool blue in a narrow gap in the clouds running all across from left to right. 

The color is fanciful, but the orderly progression of space jumps from one overlapping plane to the next. In many ways I consider it a highly truthful painting- go out and study a mountainous vista anywhere. The first thing that hits you is the enormity of the deep space. We are small, it is big and often highly dramatic. When landscape panorama is well painted it can sweep you away. 

Here's another new painting of mine, Rooms by the Sea, oil on panel, 14 x 21", 2013. It's more modest in its scale and feeling, but the key idea remains the same. It was painted in the studio Edward Hopper lived in from 1934 until the mid 1960's. In this room he created some of his most widely admired canvases. One is Hopper's oil Rooms by the Sea now in the Yale University Art Gallery that was directly inspired by this corner of his painting room and its doorway leading out to Cape Cod Bay.

I began this oil in the afternoon when the sunlight shone into the far bedroom and cast a yellowish glow throughout that farther space. In reality, the close doorway didn't get direct sunlight on it (that wall faces due north) and the entire front space was a cool blue grey. I decided to borrow the light direction Hopper used in his version of this doorway because I liked the idea of casting a diagonal shadow across the foreground. I knew in real life this invented sunlight would have changed the color of the entire front room, but I chose to ignore that in favor of its actual cool blue gray tones. 

Like in my North Passage oil above, I think it's again a truthful painting in the way it makes each of the two rooms feel different from each other. In real life Hopper's bedroom is tiny and cozy. His painting room where my easel was set up was just the opposite with its high ceiling and vastly larger size. To exaggerate the color difference between the rooms was a way to speak to how differently each space felt as you walked from one to the other. Inventing color contrasts was a way to give the viewer a sense of that.

Afternoons in Hopper's Bedroom

Sun in an Empty Room, Afternoon, oil on panel, 12 x 15", 2013

Here's one of my new paintings. It was done up in Edward Hopper's bedroom in Nyack, New York. Hopper's former boyhood home is now the Edward Hopper House Art Center. Last spring and summer I made two separate trips to Nyack to draw and paint in the house where Hopper was born and came of age.

I've written several times about how central to Hopper's painting the rooms and windows of this house would become throughout the artist's entire career. 

Painting is a slow process. I spent a lot of time alone in Hopper's bedroom as I worked, studying the patterns of light and shadow as they changed throughout the day. Painting is a tool for expression of course, but it is also an investigation. If you make a painting from direct observation, as I do, you learn a lot about a place, its light, and its feeling. Spending days in that room let me soak up some the soulfulness of Hopper's painting. Seeing Hopper's paintings years ago when I was struggling to make art student abstractions cleared my head. Hopper's light made me realize I needed to begin working as a realist painter.  What an honor to be able to spend many hours in this place where that man's vision began.

Here's my easel set up in the bedroom working on a related painting to my oil at the beginning of this post. The two windows in the photograph are the ones depicted in my oil above.

 

 Here's the view out the third window in the room, just to the left of my easel above. You can see the traffic and passers-by on the sidewalk below, a line of rooftops marching down a hill, and finally the Hudson River. Most of the elements Hopper would ever paint can be found if you just stare out this window. It's something shy and socially awkward Edward did hour upon hour as he grew up. In the final photo below is me painting in the bedroom last summer.

My oil above Sun in an Empty Room, Afternoon will be included in  the show at Isalos Fine Art in Stonington, Maine August 13 - September 2, 2013, Inside Edward Hopper's World: Paintings by Philip Koch. It will include additional paintings from the Nyack Hopper House and interiors painted in Hopper's studio on Cape Cod.

Why Do I Show Artists From the Past?

This is a painting by one of the artists I used to look at a lot when I first began painting (Jules Olitski, 1922-2007). I didn't have to look far because this is what my art professors were showing us students. And to this day I think it was a good beginning. The Olitski painting above washes over you with boldness and energy like a warm ocean wave.

Of course art is about now. It's about your experience in this moment. Over time prevailing styles in painting change partly because every generation sees a little differently. After I'd painted for only a couple of years I began to hear the whispers  artists from the past sounding a little louder. What they were saying with their work started to echo how I was feeling.

It is not that older art is better.  Actually there was lots of 2nd rate art in the old days, but most of that has fallen away, either thrown out, painted over, or forgotten and covered with cobwebs in some body's attic.Big and bold hasn't lost its appeal. At my gym in a group fitness class I love it when the instructor cranks the music way up and we all blow it out together. But I've found alongside of that there is often a depth of feeling in the little things. Quiet and reflective has power too.Take the drawing below by William Waterhouse (British, 1849- 1917). The artist points out to us things we're likely to overlook in which he found little unexpected pleasures. When we meet someone in real life we're most likely to focus on the expression in their eyes and their mouth to gauge where they're coming from. 

Waterhouse I'm sure did the same. But here he's taking a side trip to show us other things he felt we should be sure to notice. For example the way he deftly draws the outline of the woman's chin, neck and shoulder hard and dark and then fills the resulting empty space with a darker tone than in the rest of the background. It's his way of calling you to attention and saying "look at how great these shapes are." 

In this other Waterhouse drawing the entire face is toned down in favor of elegant geometry of the woman's wrist, collar, and the bottom edge of her hair as it climbs and then falls over her shoulder.

At their best, old painters like Waterhouse show us a world where they didn't settle for just any accident or drip of the brush as being good enough. 

There's an insistence and a rigorousness to the way they'd go after just a certain look for a shape or a color. They'd even practice their moves to get it right, as in this preparatory oil study below Waterhouse did for his painting The Naiad from 1893.

 

One of the things I get a kick out of is how particular the artist is in his rendering of the face- letting the one eye dominate and in turn softening the contrasts around the Naiad's nose. Waterhouse knew well that he could overload his viewers with information and took pains to tone down passages he felt less important. Doesn't the woman above seem to be staring at something?

Here's the entire canvas:

Naiads by the way were Greek mythological female water spirits who dowelled in streams and brooks. One gets the feeling life is about to get a bit more complicated for our innocent sleeping figure of Hylas on the stream's bank.

I know realist painters of our time who dismiss modernism in art and everything it has brought about. Some feel everything since Picasso has gone south. I don't feel that way. 

God knows there is a lot of work done today that ends up more pretentious and downright silly than not. But given time, most of it is going to be forgotten up in that cobweb-filled attic of time. Some pieces from our time will survive and still be valued. Exactly which is any one's guess. 

The Dragon Made Me Do It- Allen Memorial Art Museum

A thousand years ago in the Fall of 1966 I was bitten by this dragon. 

Sort of. I was in my first semester of my Freshman year at Oberlin College and was enrolled in Art History 101. It was a perplexing time- I had come to college knowing I was meant to be a sociologist or an historian. Something had gone badly awry. To my surprise and consternation, the art history survey class was the only class I was enjoying. This wasn't supposed to happen.

To get to the art history class I had walk through the Allen Memorial Art Museum's courtyard. In the middle of it was this dragon fountain happily bubbling away surrounded by decorative plantings. It was an oasis of calm in the tumultuous first few weeks of school, but beyond that I gave the serpentine critter little thought.

Here's Allen Memorial Art Museum (pretty classy place).

As we entered the waning weeks of that first semester the Art History class gave us a special assignment.  Each of us was to make an ink wash drawing to give us deeper insight into the Chinese scroll paintings we were being shown.  

Casting around for something to draw I remembered how restfully quiet that courtyard fountain and garden were and headed over there with my brush and ink. The plantings that circled the fountain seemed inviting and I ended up doing way more studies of their leaves than were required. The dragon watched me as I worked, not saying anything but seeming to like my company. It was way more fun than plowing through the mountains of assigned readings from my other classes. 

In class next week I hung my most successful drawing up on the wall among all the other students' offerings and was shocked to see how much more I enjoyed my drawing than the results the other students brought in. Huh! 

After this I found myself taking unnecessary detours to walk through the galleries of Allen Art Museum. It was funny, I didn't really know much about how to look at a painting in those days, but somehow all the work hanging together on the Museum's walls exerted a collective pull on me. The more I went, the more I wanted to stray over that way again. There was a sense that something was bubbling up from underneath and getting ready to reveal itself. Did the dragon and his gurgling fountain suggest this all to me? Perhaps in his way he did.

It was only a couple weeks before my inner resistance snapped and I was willing to admit I didn't want to be a Sociology major anymore. Scurrying over to the Registrar's Office I changed my schedule for next semester, dropping sociology and history and adding two introductory studio art classes. They proved great and I was home.

Allen Art Museum wasn't like the grandly imposing Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was the opposite of intimidating. Like the quiet dragon it was happy to welcome you but left you alone to take it in in your own way. Usually you'd be alone with the paintings, undisturbed and unruffled by tour groups or long and ponderous wall texts. 

Thy had some amazing holdings in its Permanent Collection. Here are a few of the "old friends" that I made there.

Sort of on that same dragon theme, there was a great oil by Rubens, The Finding of Erichthonius. Three daughters of Cerops have been given a sealed basket by Athena and cautioned never to open it. Of course they do and find to their horror a half-human half-serpent baby. Naturally they go insane and hurl themselves off a cliff. Well, who wouldn't?

That aside, I used to stand and marvel at the glistening silks in this Rubens painting. It was probably for me one of the first times I consciously noticed the expressive power that results from contrasting warm against cool color. Looking at the painting now I marvel at the tension and the harmony between the golden fabric and the ghostly cool flesh on the woman's arms. 

 Oberlin also has this Meindert Hobbema oil A Pond in the Forest from 1668. What a pacing and rhythm he had in how he grouped his forms. I think I was drawn to this painting largely because it reminded me so much of the forest of my boyhood home on the shore of Lake Ontario outside of Rochester. We all need to find ourselves in the works of art we admire. Hobbema seemed to have been painting in my backyard.

Of course in Art History 101 we touched on Mondrian, but there I'd only seen images of his latest work. In 1967 the Museum acquired this early observational oil by the artist. Again it showed me Mondrian paintings came from somewhere, both a literal place, and that the artist had a history and evolved only slowly into the hard core abstractions by which he's best known.

 

 



The Allen Museum also had the first Thomas Cole painting I was to see, Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill) from 1825.

Cole would initiate the first home grown movement in American painting, the nature-enshrining Hudson River School that would come to fascinate me shortly after I left Oberlin.Would I have become an artist had I not had that rendezvous with Allen Art Museum? Yes, I am sure I would. But it would have taken me longer to reach the decision. And I think my early footing would have been on a lot less solid ground. A friend once told me my blog posts often sound like love letters to art museums. I plead guilty. And this is yet another, but to one of my especially sweet first loves.

Inside Edward Hopper's World this August in Stonington, Maine

Philip Koch, Rooms by the Sea, oil on panel

14 x 21", 2013

My first couple of years studying art were pretty confusing. Mostly I stumbled through a long series of colorful abstractions but felt  they weren't leading me anywhere I wanted to go.

I was lost. Then Edward Hopper tapped me on the shoulder and said "Come this way."

As regular readers of this blog know, it was Hopper who was the major influence on my career as an artist. I never met the man but seeing the brilliance in the sunlight his paintings evoked was enough for me. I dropped my abstractions and set off working in a realist direction over four decades ago. Never looked back.

Isalos Fine Art in Stonington, Maine has just set the dates for their summer show of my work for August 13 through September 2, 2013. It will include paintings I've done of the interior spaces where the famous American realist Edward Hopper spent much of his life.

They will be exhibiting a series of painting of Edward Hopper's S. Truro, MA studio I've made during my 14 residencies there as well as some interiors painted in Hopper's boyhood home in Nyack, NY (now the Edward Hopper House Art Center). Ironically it was Victoria Hertz, who is the President of the Board of Trustees at the Hopper House Art Center, who  suggested to us we hold a Hopper- themed show in conjunction with the Hopper inspired video and dance performances by the well respected Bridgman/Packer Dance at the Stonington Opera House Aug. 13 - 18.

Edward Hopper House Art Center was kind enough last year to invite me to come to the House two separate times to paint both in Hopper's bedroom and in his big parlor.  

Here's the front of the Hopper House.

Here is my easel set up in Hopper's upstairs bedroom (the two windows behind the easel are at the upper left in the above photo).

I have been incredibly fortunate to have been granted unprecedented access to the studio Hopper built and lived in on Cape Cod in S. Truro, MA. It has become a fixture in my artist's imagination. Here's me walking back up from the beach to the famous studio last October.

The Isalos Fine Art exhibit will feature several paintings of a corner of his Truro studio's painting room Hopper made famous in his Rooms by the Sea oil. Here I am last month in the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven with that painting. It's become one of my oldest and best friends.

Here is my oil from 2004, Edward Hopper's Rooms by the Sea, 18 x 24" that will be in the Stonington show. It is a painting I did that shows more truthfully the actual architecture that inspired Hopper's more fanciful invention above. 

A vine charcoal drawing of the same studio doorway.

A new oil painted in October on location,  Hopper Studio Bedroom and Bench,  9 x 12" featuring some of Hopper's simple studio furniture and furnishings.

Here is an oil paintied in Hopper's Nyack bedroom last summer,  Sun in an Empty Room II, oil on panel, 6 1/2 x 13", 2012.

Here is Sun in an Empty Room III, oil on panel, 12 x 9", 2012  painted in the upstairs hallway peering into Hopper's bedroom at the Nyack Hopper House.

There will be an opening reception for the Isalos Fine Art exhibit Friday, August 16, 5-7 p.m. All welcome. Bridgman/Packer Dance will be performing their Hopper themed video and dance piece Voyeur at the Stonington Opera House Aug. 13-18.