A Museum with a Really Long Name and a Great Collection- Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute

Two weeks ago when I was in central and western New York State I drove east to Utica to visit a museum that had a big impact on me way back in 1967 when I was very early on in my art student days, the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute. It was the first time I'd really noticed American landscape painting and I credit MWPAI for planting a big seed in me that would sprout only a few years later. 

Mary Murray, the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, was kind enough to take a break from hanging their new Andy Warhol print show and spend time with me talking about the museum and her time working there. She was engaging and obviously loves the museum.

As I said the museum is hosting a big Warhol exhibition this summer (through Sept. 8). Warhol is an interesting figure. His celebrity rose to such a point that he was given walk on parts in Hollywood comedies, something unheard of for a visual artist.  

A real problem museums and galleries face in presenting contemporary art is much of the public feels unconnected to the work. Whether it's good or bad, a lot of people fear they don't know enough about contemporary art. Nobody wants to look ignorant,  so instinctively they stay away. It's understandable. I think the fact that many have heard of Warhol makes them more willing to come in and check out the exhibit.  And stick around to see what else the museum has hanging. Probably a lot of new feet that have never before entered the museum will come through their doors.

One of the crowning glories of MWPAI's Collection is Edward Hopper's The Camel's Hump, an oil from 1930 that Hopper painted from what would become his driveway to his studio in S. Truro on Cape Cod. The landmark "hump" in the painting sadly was destroyed years later by an over eager builder who bulldozed the thing to make way for a house he wanted to build, which strikes me as idiotic. Ironically he had failed to secure building permits and construction of the offending house never happened. To this day you can see the hole in the ground where the pyramid-shaped dune that attracted Hopper's eye once stood. 

When I first went to stay in Hopper's studio in the fall of '83 I did an oil from exactly the same spot Hopper stood on to do his painting, but without the central feature, the scene feels empty. Standing in the MWPAI looking at Hopper's magnificent oil I found myself toying with the idea of going back to my painting and inserting the old hump. Maybe I will. 

Here's a terrific George Luks (American 1867-1933) Roundhouse at High Bridge from 1909-10. Sadly my photo doesn't do the painting justice. There's an elegant range of colors to the rising columns of smoke and a daring asymmetry to the canvas.

Below is another of the paintings I find amazing Sunset from 1856 by Frederic Church (American, 1826-1900).  I think this is one of Church's very strongest paintings. Look at the skillful counterbalancing in the sky. He wants an authentic brilliance to the light, not some cheesy effect, so he makes the gold sky on the horizon strong but not as intense as it could be. Church turns the volume way down on the cool violet pink grays in the other clouds and makes most of the sky an almost neutral bluish gray. Also there is an admirable range of edge qualities to his clouds, from distinct in the low hanging oranges to filmy and in the upper reaches. When it came to artful paint handling, nobody could touch Church.

Church's teacher was Thomas Cole (1801-1848) who lived just a bit farther east from MWPAI in the town of Catskill, NY. It was there that Cole painted one of the most impressive holdings in MWPAI's Collection, the monumental four panel series The Voyage of Life from1839-40. (A second version of the series painted later is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC). Cole's a fascinating guy- his wholehearted embrace of nature wins you over. In particular, he had a gift for carving out deep spaces and filling them with luscious light-filled atmosphere. In a way he's the anti-Warhol, painting his vistas without a touch of the tongue-in-cheek irony you see in pop art. I find Cole's sincerity is quite moving.  

The first two panels of The Voyage of Life series, Childhood (L) and Youth (R). If I could only have one, I'm a sucker for the first panel with the baby full of the glowing excitement of expectation 

flowing out of the mountainside cave. I want to hop in the boat with him.

Followed by Manhood (L), and Old Age (R). 

The museum also owns an oil study Cole made in preparation for his Manhood panel. I love the cool highlight in the churning water in the foreground played off against the warm yellow highlights in the sky.

One of the things that's fun about visiting a new museum is your eye doesn't quite know what to expect and can be caught by artists you rarely see. I spied this oil from a distance and immediately liked the sharp, truncated forms all crowding around each other. It's by Preston Dickinson (1891-1935), an early American modernist. Dickinson studied at my old Alma Mater, The Art Students League of New York. It's Fort George Hill from 1915. 

A composition like this could have just been a jumble, but Dickinson clusters together his separated forms into groups of similar tone and color to provide an overriding simplicity for the eye. Also like the Cole study above, he beautifully plays warm and cool off against each other in his highlights.

One other thing I loved at the museum was the brightly painted room where they have art supplies all laid out for kids (or maybe anyone else) to try their hand. Topping that off, you get to set up and work right next to a beautiful oil by one of the great masters of American landscape, George Inness (1825-1894).  I am sure old George is looking down approvingly from art heaven.

MWPAI lies just south of the Barge Canal, the successor to the historic Erie Canal that connected the Hudson River and New York City with Buffalo and the Great Lakes. In its day it was a technological and engineering marvel and it retains an unassuming sort of beauty. When I was very little we lived in Fairport, NY just a couple of blocks from the canal. I still recall the thrill to my 3 year old eyes of seeing the lift bridge on the town's main street raise up to let boat traffic pass through. I made a point of stopping at several points on my trip to check out my old friend the Canal. 

Here's one of the results I did early one morning, Barge Canal, vine charcoal, 12 x 9", 2013.

The Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, New York

Last week I traveled to Ithaca, NY to visit Cornell University's Johnson Museum of Art. Housed in a unique towering I.M. Pei designed building, the Museum is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. The Museum's Director, Stephanie Wiles, who I knew as the Director at my alma mater Oberlin College's Allen Memorial Art Museum, took up the reins a year and a half ago at the Johnson. She very graciously had offered to give me a personally guided tour of her new Museum so I jumped at the chance.

Ithaca is on Cayuga Lake, the largest of New York's Finger Lakes and loomed large in my imagination. Years ago when I was living on my parents' money I used to race small sailboats all over the Finger Lakes. (The height of my youthful athletic achievement was winning the Central New York Penguin Class sailing championship one year at the Ithaca Yacht Club. Yes I will sign autographs if asked). 

I've been a committed landscape painter since 1971. My visual art has long drawn on my experiences in nature growing up in western New York, not the least the impressive hills around parts of the Finger Lakes. The Johnson Museum is perched way up on a steep hillside with a commanding view of Cayuga Lake. My cell phone photograph doesn't do justice to how the sweep of the space feels, but here's the view looking north out one of the Museum's windows. Pretty hard to beat.

Stephanie Wiles took me all through the Johnson, explaining the heart of their Museum is its Rockwell Collection of Asian art. They also have up right now (through Aug. 18, 2013) a wonderful show of photo realist landscape and architecture paintings by my old friend Alice Dalton Brown, one of the very few other professional painters to come out of Oberlin College as I did. Alice and I met years ago when we both showed in the same gallery in New York City.

Naturally as the American painting enthusiast that I am I paid special attention to those works, and the Johnson has some beauties (please excuse the tortured camera angles on some of these- I had to shoot obliquely on some to avoid glare from gallery windows). Below is a lovely and surprisingly modest George Luks (1867 - 1933, born not far from Ithaca down in Williamsport, PA). Luks was one of the Ashcan School painters and was known for his vigorous and expressionist style. 

Here's an unusually quiet oil from him titled simply Nude, probably an earlier piece and one I find subtly appealing. I love the close attention Luks pays to the outer silhouette of the figure. For example the way he crafts the contours of the woman's left leg so its curves say something different than the much more straight trajectories of the right leg's outside edge. Also the colors in his mid toned shadows in the figure gradate from warm sienna red in the head and arms to cool beiges in the belly. This temperature shifting of the colors of skin adds such an expressiveness to the otherwise restrained pose. A beautiful little painting.

The Johnson also has a great George Inness (American 1837 - 1926) Landscape- Figures in a Field, from 1886. Inness had a gift for contrasting linear tree trunks against softer and more filmy foliage  and he's at the top of his game here. Inness always seems to me to have taken the time to really study the trees before him. He paints them as if they are awesome giant abstract sculptures. I sometimes think beginning landscape painters should be locked in a cell for a year with only a big book of George Inness paintings to look at before they're allowed to go outside to paint trees. It would be a better world.

Back in 2006 my wife and I journeyed out to Monhegan Island 12 miles off the coast of Maine where Edward Hopper (American 1882 - 1967) spent several summers painting as a young artist. Here's an early Hopper, Monhegan Landscape, ca. 1916-1919, that still has the broad wet-into-wet paint handling Hopper learned from his teachers like Robert Henri (the leading spirit of the Ashcan School). Later on Hopper's paint would become more thinly applied and more dry in appearance, but his devotion to clear, bright sunlight seen here would stay with him for the rest of his life. 

The Hopper oil has a distinctive rhythm to how the artist arranged his forms. Powerful but unusual compositions were one of his great strengths. In this one the color intensity of the blue water has been jacked up to a very high level. In turn Hopper turns down the intensity of the greens, grays and browns on the shore to let the viewer's eye rest. This sort of exaggeration played off against restraint is one of the things I so love with Hopper. Studying his work has taught me so much as a painter.

The Johnson also has a very famous oil by the American painter Edwin Dickinson (1891-1978), Woodland Scene, that Dickinson worked on from 1929-1935. I know it's not a great photo, but it's

a heck of a good painting, moody as hell. If you like it I urge you to look it up. 

Dickinson, by the way, years ago received an honorary degree from my art school, the Maryland Institute College of Art. By the time we got around to awarding it to him he was old, mostly blind, and couldn't travel. So we sent Doug Frost, then our Director for Development, up to Cape Cod to give Dickinson the award at his home. He told me that Dickinson took the distinction very seriously and was obviously delighted to be recognized by the country's second oldest art school. I've always taken pleasure in that story.

Finally here's a beautiful Arthur Dove ( American, 1880-1946) oil, Alfie's Delight from 1929. Dove knew his stuff, and here pulls off a little masterpiece of movement and delicious subtly surprising color. He doesn't tell you just what you're looking at, but he spells out just how the painting feels. 

I highly recommend a trip over to Ithaca to visit the Johnson. A beautiful museum in a stunning setting. You'll love it.

It Came from the Vault...Memorial Art Gallery

Have you ever wondered what an art museum has stashed away in their storage room? If you hurry you can still catch a show designed to give you some answers.

Through June 9, 2013 there's a hoot of an exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY. Playfully titled It Came From the Vault by the show's curator Marie Via, the museum's Director of Exhibitions, the show sheds light on why some of the works it holds in storage are rarely exhibited. It's a big, boisterous show of several hundred pieces. If you can't find something you really like you're just not trying. Here's a link to the Memorial Art Gallery's page about the exhibition.

Sometimes the work that languishes in storage just doesn't fit the themes that the museum's curators develop for their shows. Other times the work is awaiting cleaning or restoration. Or the pieces are a bit odd and the curators don't quite know what to make of them. There are a few truly odd pieces here to ponder.

Or, they may be works on paper that can't have sustained exposure to bright light. The Winslow Homer watercolor below is an example, Paddling at Dusk,from 1892. Homer does a great balancing act between the relatively simplified figure (who has an active silhouette but almost nothing else in the way of details) and the boldly stated waves and ripples. I love the simple contrasts of the warm hues of the paddler and the boat against all the surrounding cool colors. (please excuse the reflections from the gallery's lights at the top of this and a few of the other photos below).

Below is a painting by the less well known Birger Sandzen (American, 1871- 1956). Up close one gets almost lost in a sea of heavy palette-knife-applied pigment. All you can see is the richness of the surface. Then stepping back the painting transforms completely and one sees it's also about deep space, light and atmosphere.

A real treat for me was this woodcut by the Polish artist Janinn Konarsky (1900-1975), an artist I hadn't known about before, which always makes for a little extra excitement of discovery. Konarsky playfully tilts up the angle of the tennis court to let us see the action of her four figures. This could have made for problems with so much empty pavement to cover. So the artist puts in this lovely subtle texture to the court's orange surface. The trees that line the court add a muscular rhythm of their own, as if they're aching to grab a racquet and join the game too. 

Kathleen McEnery (American, 1885 -1971) was there with a big impressive painting. Marie Via's notes for the painting add "The artist was about twenty-two when she painted this bold and modern woman." McEnery, another artist I hadn't known obviously knew her stuff. 

Her dates are almost exactly the same as the much better known artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967) and like Hopper, she too studied at the New York School of Art with the famous painter and teacher Robert Henri. I wonder if they knew each other back then. And she had two of her paintings included in the historic Amory Show of 1913 (whereas Hopper only got one of his pieces included). McEnery later moved to Rochester and was for many years active with the Memorial Art Gallery. One wonders if her career might have gone very differently had she not been a woman in those times when female artists so often were ignored. I love coming across really strong work like this by artists who aren't household names. I think she's one of the stars of The Vault.

Via's show also had some very heavy hitters. Degas (French 1834-1917) weighs in with Dancers from about 1900. It's a pastel and charcoal drawing done on tracing paper and it's a real beauty. Degas liked to really get down and sink into his compositions, studying them and making all sorts of versions of the same basic pose of figures to extract the most expressive compositions. Perhaps this piece is on tracing paper as he'd borrowed the grouping from an earlier drawing or painting and wanted to continue exploring new possible arrangements of his shapes and colors. (There's an old quote from Degas where he urges young artist to do a drawing over ten times and then to do it over a hundred times. Sure he was exaggerating, but you get the idea. And he often followed his own advice).

Here's a detail of the central section of Degas' pastel. I love the squeezed tiny intervals of empty space in between all the torsos, arms, and heads. Here Degas is showing us how much visual energy can be achieved just by careful placement and positioning of his forms. It's a delightful maze-like passage. This guy is good.

And in honor of the spirit of the unexpected, which was one of Marie Via's ideas for this wide ranging show, here's a piece I loved by another artist who's new to me, Carol Aquilano, who is on the staff at the Memorial Art Gallery. It's North River, Marshfield, MA, a sumi ink and acrylic wash on paper piece from 2003. 

I was immediately drawn to it for its artful balance between heavily patterned grasses played off against smoother passages. Aquilano gets a wonderfully wide range of greens and grays to do a lot for her in this piece. My eye was immediately reminded of all the great Charles Burchfield watercolors of waving grasses and leaves I had seen just the day before over in Buffalo, NY at the Burchfield Penny Art Center.

Marie Via was kind enough to give me a personal guided tour of her show which was fun. I had a chance to tell her how much I loved the show's title and the spooky old-horror-movie image of the spaced out woman. Art is serious business, of course, but it's not without humor sometimes. As a kid who wasted countless hours growing up watching really bad science fiction movies on late night TV in a Rochester suburb, as soon as I saw the title for this show I knew I had to come. Glad I did. Highly recommended.

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.