3/16: Philip Koch Update

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 Philip Koch, The Whisper II, oil on panel, 12" x 16", $2,800

 

Philip Koch has been busy. His mid-career retrospective,  "Unbroken Thread: Nature Paintings and the American Imagination" will start a five-museum tour:

The University of Maryland University College (May 4 through June 22)

The Maryland Institute College of Art ( February - March, 2009)

The Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, MA (June - August 2009)

The Midwest Museum of American Art, Elkhart, IN (June - September, 2010)

Saginaw Art Museum, Saginaw, MI (early 2011) 

 

Of course, you can see his work here at Isalos, too. If that's not enough, there's a great article about him in the April issue of Fine Art Connoisseur. There he is, right next to an article about Wayne Thiebaud. I'll admit, I'd never seen this magazine before, but it's beautiful and the articles are well-written and readable. (I get some of the other art magazines, but I look at the pictures and fall asleep while reading the articles).

 It's business as usual here in Stonington. It snows, the snow melts, the melodramas come and go. Occasionally we see cars with out of state plates, usually pulling up at the real estate offices. The roads are treacherous with frost heaves, and the harbor is still full of fishing boats, some rigged with scallop gear. Our oil bills have been outrageous, and I hear plenty of complaints about winter. Still, I have to admit, every time it starts to snow, I love watching those flakes come down. Maybe it would be different if we had television reception (I think it's a good reason not to have it).

 

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Posted on Sunday, March 16, 2008 at 11:31AM by Registered Commenterisalos fine art | CommentsPost a Comment

1/30: Late Afternoon Walk

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Lately, we try to get out for a walk when we can, usually in late afternoon: up to Indian Point Road, to Ames Pond and back. Last summer we did a show about Ames Pond. We could easily do a show based on what's between us and the pond (but we won't). Today we went after the rain stopped, when the wind was strong and the eastern sky glowed with a weird light.
 
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It's hard not to notice how many houses are empty. We've noticed it coming back from kayaking: all those houses, but only a light here and there. Indian Point Road is no exception. Between the Catholic Church and Ames Pond, we counted 32 houses visible from the road. Only six are currently occupied.
 
 
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6 out of 32 houses. We could have even counted a few more empty ones that aren't really visible from the road. That's about 18% occupancy.  One walks through neighborhoods of empty houses which are apparently worth small fortunes, despite their humble appearances. Real estate signs decorate lawns: the ranch house that almost has a great view of the Thorofare for nearly a half-million, the one across the street that was flipped in less than a year.
 
 
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Whatever. Despite the 82% decline in households spending their money here, I suppose I might benefit from the whole scenario. I've been doing construction work again lately. It's good work; I enjoy it. Maybe it's like enjoying the storms at least as much as the easy weather. If you live here, it helps to get that feeling of excitement when the wind and waves pick up and the sky looks like something out of the Wizard of Oz, or maybe the Book of Revelations. Life would be a bit dull without the storms.
 
 
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Posted on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 at 08:29PM by Registered Commenterisalos fine art | CommentsPost a Comment

1/18: Philip Koch Video

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Philip Koch has a three and a half-minute video from an interview he did with Maryland Public Television.  It features scenes of him  painting in his studio and  a number of his paintings, narrated with personal comments about his  work. I appreciate his story of how the aroma of oil paints drew him away from his more academic direction and into the studio.
 
I like that fresh paint smell as well. Almost exactly twenty years ago, at college,  I followed that aroma into Rebecca's painting studio. Joseph Campbell instructs us to  follow our bliss. Sometimes that means following your nose.
 
Posted on Friday, January 18, 2008 at 11:04AM by Registered Commenterisalos fine art | CommentsPost a Comment

1/15: Morning After The Storm

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Posted on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 10:10AM by Registered Commenterisalos fine art | CommentsPost a Comment

1/10: Seattle

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We saw at least 42 galleries in  the last couple of weeks. That’s quite a bunch if you’re really taking a good look, and you can become almost dizzy with  the effort. Most of these we saw last Thursday and Friday, our final days of travel.

After Port Hadlock, we took a ferry to just north of Seattle and saw a few more galleries. One gallerist won my “most solicitous” award. In a gallery of her own paintings, she left her students in the back room to hover beside us, pointing out the merits of each of her paintings, comparing her water lilies to Monet’s. She didn’t wait for any reaction or clue from us, just launched into her spiel. I couldn’t get out of there soon enough. This is why many of us hesitate to even enter single-artist galleries.

 

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For First Thursday, we focused on the Pioneer Square area. It was raining heavily when we arrived. We put on our rain gear and forged ahead to the first galleries, where the rain obviously kept the attendance down. Then, through the tall corner windows of a building ahead, we saw the brightly-lit, glowing colors of what could only be a ten-foot high hanging Dale Chihuly sculpture.
It drew us out of the dark and rain into the Foster White Gallery, a huge space with a new show opening by two painters, Sherry Bakes and James Martin.

I immediately liked Bakes’ vague landscapes, but I wasn’t sure about Martin’s small, crudely-painted fantasies. I kept looking though, and the more I looked, the more they grew on me. They were loosely painted on what appeared to be kraft paper, simply framed and affordably-priced (about $650 to $1200). Most seemed to have some sort of story going on: a fancy yellow car up on blocks surrounded by a scene acted-out by scantily-clad starlets and cowboys, with the occasional celebrity like Andy Warhol or Van Gogh mixing things up with anthropomorphized lions. The paintings made me smile, and as more visitors arrived, I found I wasn’t the only
one. I looked the whole collection over a couple of times, and settled on the lion’s head on the Pez dispenser body. All I had to do was put it on the credit card, but that card had gone through  a tough workout lately, and I left feeling a pang of loss.

We followed the growing crowd to more galleries, including the Tishuro Kaplan building, where artist studios and “corridor galleries” were open. If you wanted wine and crackers, these are the places to go (food and drink were noticeably absent at the bigger galleries, except for a few of the privleged few visitors). Here, the artists were much more adventurously dressed and pierced, and the media was likely to include menstrual blood, “ritual” blood and hair on doilies.

 

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On Friday, we continued our gallery walk to the Pike Market area and downtown where we visited another ten or so galleries. Our flight was at midnight, so we had some time to kill, but we were all getting a bit weary. Highlights included the Lisa Harris Gallery, the William Traver Gallery, and photographs at the Benham Gallery. When one gallery attendant asked “so, what do you think?” I was at a loss. (Would I ask such a general question of my visitors? Probably not.)

At the mall, where we had to catch the monorail back to the car, we sat down and ate a pizza, getting up one last burst of energy for the last gallery, which was nearby: yes, the “Painter of Light” himself, Thomas Kinkade. The gallery was done-up like a quaint village shoppe, with multiple panes of glass showcasing the sweet scenes of yesteryear inside. We poked our heads in and saw that the shoppe-keeper was making a sale- the only one I witnessed taking place in over forty galleries.

That lion with the Pez body
still hasn’t sold. Aw shucks, now it has.

 

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Posted on Thursday, January 10, 2008 at 07:39PM by Registered Commenterisalos fine art | Comments2 Comments
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