Connie Fox at Pamela Williams Gallery

by Janet Goleas

East Hampton Star
Arts and Living

July 22, 2010

Connie Fox grew up in Colorado along a wide stretch of prairie that stared out toward the distant Rockies. After college, she zigzagged across the globe from California to Denmark, painting, taking photographs, and defining the creative platform that has sustained her visual art for over 60 years.
Returning stateside in 1952, Ms. Fox studied at the University of New Mexico, where she worked with a bevy of abstractionists, among them Adja Yunkers and Elaine de Kooning, with whom she would share a lifelong friendship.As a descendant of America’s abstract traditions, Connie Fox might be placed at the whip end of that legacy. But it is clear from her exhibit “Connie Fox: Sammy’s Beach,” now on view at the Pamela Williams Gallery in Amagansett, that Ms. Fox is nowhere near the end of anything.
The new works, a group of quite large and very small paintings, are a mélange of intense textures and iridescent grounds that play against knots of charcoal and pigment, drips and grids. The canvases display a playful urgency, anchoring subject matter in that netherworld that exists between cognition and disorder.
Working from the landscape is a departure for this artist, and here she draws inspiration from the natural order found in Northwest Woods, at Sammy’s Beach. Nearly every day for the past 30 years, Ms. Fox has visited this beach, where she walks along the crescent of shoreline, swims in Gardiner’s Bay, or stops to meditate in the sun.
A few years ago, she began taking photographs, and over time she managed to accumulate some 200 digital images printed on inexpensive computer paper.
It seems clear that Ms. Fox has found common ground between the duality of her reverie in situ and the likeness of it.  I mention this because this particular duality — the one between the actual thing and a representation of that thing — is one of the cornerstones of 20th-century American art. The dissonance between the real and its simulation has fueled much of abstract painting as well as a few academic careers, among them that of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.
Back on dry land, Connie Fox, no doubt, isn’t thinking about any of this. She’s in her studio transforming visual memory, viscera, and kinetic energy into subject matter. Her application of paint is direct and unmediated.
In “Sammy’s Beach I,” she gouges charcoal lines onto the canvas face in frenzied root shapes and broken veins, fixing them to the surface underneath thick layers of gel medium. Moving to the right, gashes of blue spill down the length of the canvas like an errant waterfall. Across the rectangle, a vague grid slices beneath swaths of watery color, charcoal, and brushwork. In the center, a diamond shape hovers in the space between foreground and background.
“I don’t set out to paint a diamond,” said the artist last week, “but if it looks like one, I feel like I’ve got an extra charge out of it — it’s really only afterward that I figure out what I’ve got.”
Ms. Fox, now 85, has figured out quite a lot. Until now, there has been little in the way of the lingering imagery that is present in this series. Sammy, it seems, has got under her skin.
Although these works are confidently nonrepresentational, they cast an eye around the movement, light, air, and stillness — even the decay — that Ms. Fox references when she talks about Sammy’s Beach. The name alone smacks of razor-sharp sunlight, saturated blues, and the mounds of seaweed that pile up in pitch-black berms.
Ms. Fox understands the beauty and the entropy of the natural world, and in capturing it she depicts not the way it looks, but what it does. It glistens and moves, and, as in her paintings, its color and form morph into a multitude of permutations.