Erik Koeppel - Painting the Profound

The show will feature 20 of the New Hampshire artist’s signature Hudson River School landscapes, each depicting a journey towards a higher ideal of beauty in nature.

Erik Koeppel is renowned as a leader in the revival of the techniques of the Hudson River School and its New England counterpart, the White Mountains School. However, he does not recover these 19th-century methods merely as a means of historical pastiche. Instead, he restores a vital language grand enough to describe feelings of Love and Fear, to confront Life and Death, and to inspire Rebirth. Walking in the footsteps of the great American painters before him, Koeppel explores Nature with a capital N, espousing the philosophy that the landscape is a reflection of a higher spiritual ideal related to the Platonic notion of Absolute Beauty. “In the act of painting,” Koeppel says, “I have sought to discover that highest knowledge of Beauty, poetic and philosophical, that has been the common thread between all of the Great Masters of Art. It is my belief that to experience the Beauty of our existence here in this magnificent landscape is the only way to happiness. My intention as an artist is to share that Beauty.”

For Koeppel, the powerful methods of the masters are, in fact, an urgently needed voice in contemporary culture. Asserting the expressive potential of traditional representation, he hopes his work will foster connection, communication, and contemplation of the universal human condition. To view one of his paintings is to share in a profound experience of nature across time, inflected with symbolism and feeling. The viewer enters his landscapes as a traveler, encouraged by the composition to walk through the obstacles of a forested foreground, across a series of spatial transitions, into a deep view and the wonder of a final vista. This shared exploration is both visual and philosophical. Like much of the work of the 19th-century masters, Koeppel’s paintings combine the bucolic with the sublime and lead the viewer on a journey from peaceful meditation to higher thoughts before finally arriving at a sort of spiritual enlightenment.

Very conscious of his goals as an artist, Erik reflects, “When I look at a beautiful painting from the past, I feel a deep consolation that someone way back when has thought as I think and loved as I love. My hope is to send that same message as far as I’m able out into the unknown future.” He explains that this kind of communion is good for the human spirit and that truly great paintings, in their revelation of a higher notion of beauty, deeply stir the soul. Aiming for the very heights of artistic mastery, Koeppel’s work seeks to tap into the great questions and ideas that have endured, like the landscape, across millennia and to reveal something of the profundity of our existence.