Connie Fox was born and raised in Fowler, Colorado (pop. 1000),  a land surrounded by open prairie where winter wheat and sugar beets grow sweet off waters fed by the nearby Arkansas River. But in the 1930’s, Fowler sat on the rim of the dustbowl, the name given to the devastating conditions that swept across the mid-westerm plains. Connie remembers those days, when huge clouds of soil, called black rollers, rumbled through town like an angry posse, kicking up dry orange dust that stung the eyes. Old ladies swore that the world was coming to an end.

But Connie saw it all through a child’s eyes. She remembers the warm sun turning that dust into a magical orange glow. She remembers the land, the river, the distant Rocky mountains, not as landscape, but as the bony structure, the architecture of the place. She recalls others places she’s lived in much the same way: the Rockies of New Mexico, the Pacific Ocean and swaying palms of Southern California, Europe seen from a bicycle, rural Northern Denmark ( a ringer for Colorado), the sheer rock face of the Sandia Mountains near Alburquerque, cottonwood trees along the Rio Grande, the Berkley Hills, the Ohio River in Pennsylvania and now, the bays and Atlantic Ocean breaking waves on the shores of  Eastern Long Island. All these places continue to live within her, in a Proustian sense. They meander into her abstract paintings intuitively, as different spaces and places  inhabitating her rectangular canvases.  The current Sammy’s Beach series of paintings and drawings, for example -- though they look nothing like Sammy’s Beach --  were the unanticipated outcome of hours spent photographing, sitting and swimming on a strand of  Gardiner’s Bay near the home she shares with her husband, the sculptor, Bill King.

Fox was a student during World War II, finishing high school then attending the University of Colorado where she received a BFA. Soon after graduating she moved to southern California to attend Art Center School in Los Angeles  for a rigorous program of  drawing, perspective, rendering, and composition. She earned money in a Felliniesque assortment of jobs; as a waitress in a coffee shop near Hollywood and Vine, rubbing shoulders with a cast of starving actors and Zoot Suiters; as an airbrush painter making trendy “hand-painted” ties; as a flower assembler for Rosebowl parade floats, and as a “ghost” watercolorist for a painter of romantic vistas of old Southern mansions. Her employer sold them to tourists.

In Los Angeles she for the first time saw paintings by the Surrealists. They had a powerful effect on her as did avant-garde film, especially Cocteau’s charged silences and Fellini’s flamboyant imagery. The ambiguities and dislocations of these films continue to  ricochet between the pure abstraction and unexpected figuration found in Connie’s paintings.

In 1950, Connie and two friends took off on a 1000 mile bicycle trip through Europe, riding from Rotterdam north through Scandinavia, then south to Italy, painting and photographing along the way. When she returned, she found an art world bursting with youthful vitality, in New York, California and New Mexico, where she went  for her Masters Degree. There she met Robert Mallary, Adja Yunkers and Elaine DeKooning, with whom she forged a lifelong friendship.  

DeKooning was a frequent visitor when Connie moved back to  California, where she lived with her first husband and  two children, Megan and Brian.  In later years Connie taught  at  Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh ,The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Long Island University, Southampton, New York and the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont. In 1979, at Elaine DeKooning’s  urging, she moved to East Hampton where she continues to live and work. 

Works by Connie Fox are in several museums and collections. Her art has been covered by important writers and critics, and in 2013 she received a Purchase Award from the  American Academy of Arts and Letters.