Connie Fox Doesn’t Think Like You Think She Thinks

By Amei Wallach

"Countersquares," the title that Connie Fox has chosen for this exhibition, sets up a word play as profound, concrete and dangerously poetic as one of her paintings. It riffs on "Counterspies," a word out of realpolitik, paperback mysteries and the Cold War paranoia so politically useful in the world after 9/11. Fox’s species of art making comes out of her time and is of our moment. It fuels a long career in painting that continues to astonish with its protean audacity. In her hands, painting is always an adventure whose end is in doubt, like a road trip through a beautiful landscape booby-trapped with undercurrents of violence and flux.

She was six when the first of the "black blizzards" swept away the top soil in the Colorado prairie town of Fowler where she grew up, rendering the landscape inchoate and sear. Custom and continuity became pitiful incongruities against the Dust Bowl panorama of abandoned tools, decomposing houses and nebulous horizons. Her father was the town banker. He knew all the stories and all the storytellers. Eighteen years later, in 1949, when she first encountered Surrealism as an art student, at the Copley gallery in Los Angeles, there was the shock of recognition. Soon she identified affinities with Fellini’s "flamboyant film collages 1" and the "charged silences" of Cocteau.

In her boisterous, carnivalesque paintings of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Target (1992), with its precipitous incident and abrupt alterations in direction and intent, intimations of the film collages were in the ascendancy. In the remarkable work of her 82nd year, it is more often the silences.

Fox has discovered a new attraction to transparency through the light-diffusing qualities of washes and iridescent paint. As always, provocation and paradox are at stake, even in the silence of emptiness and infinity. In Famous Actress, 2006, vaporous emanations of stained, dripped and mottled color abut, alter one another and exit at inconclusive edges. In Fiore di Lisi, 2006, the palpable form of a fleur de lis dissolves in enigmatic emanations. The spaces in which silences stretch are compressed in Elstir’s Field, 2006, its miniature landscapes embedded within unruly grids of squares.

Painting, just now, is once again in critical and commercial favor in the world of art. But Fox was painting through all the years when performance, video, conceptualism and installation had seemed to sound its death knell. She once admired a bumper sticker which read "My God Isn’t Dead, Sorry About Yours," because it could so easily lend itself to the stance "My Painting Isn’t Dead, Sorry About Yours," She makes paintings as life force by remaining vigilant for vagrant emotions that she can animate through the cunning and authority of her formal means.

Cunning, that Surrealist tool, is integral to her process. But it is the cunning of the Trickster who remakes experience through paradoxical intervention, like the Coyote of American Indian myth, or the Buddhist master. The original Surrealist fixation was on the dramatic effect- the Comte de Lautreamont’s "chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella." But Fox, like Coyote or Joseph Beuys, is looking for "bizarre juxtapositions that create new meaning." She has been meditating since 1970 and is a long-time member of author and Zen priest Peter Matthiessen’s Ocean Zendo. Though she insists on a "separation between church and state," as she puts it, between religious practice and painting practice, the trickery asserts itself in a repertoire of visual puns. She’ll play hide-and-seek with the fact that she is painting a hat in Three Hats and a Glove, 2002, or render the heft of a child’s metal jack as floating and transparent in Hatting the Jack, 2003. The squares in Engine, 2006 can be read as a play on Renaissance perspective, a foray into Matisse’s double entendre realm of when-is-a-window-a-painting, or a subversion of the grided structure of the Abstract Expressionism that helped form her.

She herself identifies the artist’s muse as the Trickster described in the introductory "Prophecy" section of Europe, William Blake’s epic poem of 1794. This muse presents itself as a fairy, who sits "on a streak’d Tulip" and sings a mocking song about the "five windows" through which man, in his shadowed Platonic cave, experiences the world that holy men and artists transmute. "I like it when Blake talks about things entering through the senses, and how for the artist they can open up ways to reveal transcendental reality." 2

Blake’s poet captures the fairy in his hat and takes it home.

"Wild flowers I gather’d & he shew’d me each eternal flower:
He laugh’d aloud to see them whimper because they were pluck’d.
They hover’d round me like a cloud of incense: when I came
Into my parlour and sat down and took my pen to write,
My Fairy sat upon the table and dictated EUROPE."

"But you can guess that this is not going to be a ‘they lived happily ever after’ ending. This fairy is a trickster. Besides that he drinks too much, there’s trouble ahead." 3

Fox’s gift for visual pranks and paradox was already in fine working order in the 1955 line drawing, Self Portrait as Flower. The flower is a bearded iris, the beard being her come-hither body, the stem her long legs, the stamen her face comically embellished with spectacles. As happens periodically throughout her career, that drawing and the paintings and sculptures that followed were instigated by a "hilarious" 4 card that a friend sent to her when she was at Berkeley in the 1960s. He had inserted his unshaven face into the center of a flower, which appealed to Fox in part because flowers, like all forms of beauty, were taboo territory to painters of her generation. She challenged and subverted that beauty in a body of work climaxed by a series of 5’ x 6’ and 6’ x 8’ planar human-faced flowers, with an energy and sculptural thrust that could very well have gone in the direction Elizabeth Murray chose.

For Fox, sculpture was a dead end, but the flower has surfaced intermittently in her paintings, most recently in the just completed Fiore di Lisi. Fiore di Lisi culminates a body of work that encompasses the unlike but equally extraordinary Famous Actress, and, this would seem to be the moment to back up and consider the process by which Fox’s most recent flowering came to be. As in Blake’s poem, it was initiated through the senses.

Sight: she had two buckets of water in which she had washed her brushes. One was pink, one blue, and, as is sometimes her habit, she set herself a problem: in this case to make a blue and pink painting, one that kept the "watery aspect of each color. " She has lived on the East End of Long Island for 26 years, but unlike so many of her painter neighbors, had never addressed its amphibious light.

Touch: To prairie native Fox, ocean swimming remains mysterious- a quality she prizes in painting. On a swim late in the summer of 2005, she touched "this fantastic silky thing and felt I’d been very briefly allowed into another world, self sufficient and enclosed". That encounter was with a jellyfish, which may feel like a warm body, but it stings. And so, often, do Fox’s paintings, with their Trickster interventions.

Fox admires Gerhardt Richter, who plays sleight of hand with issues of abstraction, figuration and context. As Richter has in the past, Famous Actress inquires into the properties of dissolution, though it is the luminescence of transparency that Fox is after. The viewer is submerged in parallel washes of color. The left vertical ‘pink’ is a declension of quinacra reds that range from rosy mist to the purple tint of dried blood, depending on intensity. Passages in danger of descending into lyricism are stained a urine yellow. The blue panel to the right is mostly a matter of greys and glaring luminous whites over which tints of blue suggest the aqueous East Hampton atmosphere. In the foreground, quinacra burnt orange thrusts like piers or undulates like wreckage under water. The painting transmits an unease, a vacillation between creation and destruction.

Fiore di Lisi raises the stakes. Clearly related to Famous Actress in effect. Its formal antecedent is Tijuana Squares, 2005, one of the earliest paintings in which Fox experimented with her equivocal grids of squares. The arresting scraped passages, drawings, drips and slightly seedy squares in Tijuana Squares read as more elaborate than complex, and Fox wanted to restate the problem in a new painting, which became Fiore di Lisi.

Fiore di Lisi, is, of course, Italian for fleur de lys. (It is also, another pun, the name of her hair cutter.) The fleur de lys comes with a long art historical pedigree, which Fox undercuts assiduously, despite her penchant for an iridescent gold paint reminiscent of gold-leafed Renaissance haloes, not to mention those perspectival squares. This fleur de lys is gaseous and smokey, anchored in a smudged charcoal line. It is unmistakably descended from Self Portrait as Flower of half a century earlier. Ghostly profiles appear to waft upwards from its leaves, goofy and appalling. A path of blue squares and the stepped left-to-right diagonal attempt to lead in the same direction. But it is the downward red drips that transfix the eye, splashing onto yellow, luminous white and flecks of gold. At the right edge of the fleur de lys, a red square seeps like burst boil, contaminating a burr of left-over gold. A scraped and scumbled square of grisly red colonizes the crook of the flower’s left leaf. History and art history, life and death, body and spirit counter one another on this battlefield. And painting wins.

"I don’t think like you think I think," her five-year-old grandson informed her when she suggested that he thought like an artist.

In the interstices between tumult and silence, Connie Fox, Trickster, rethinks experience. She makes paintings whose relationship to complexity is congruent with the realities of the real world at the start of the 21st century, but missing from so much of contemporary response to it.

1 Unless otherwise indicated. Quotes are from three conversations with Connie Fox at her East Hampton studio July 5, July 27 and August 21, 2006.

2 July 27, 2006. Conversation with Connie Fox.

3 "Straight to the Source: Conversations With Esat End Artists Al Loving and Connie Fox"; panel discussion on the originating impulse in artmaking, moderated by curator Alicia Longwell, The Parrish Museum, Southampton, NY, September 12, 2003.

4 In the 1980’s, the painter Elaine de Kooning sent Fox a postcard in which a nude woman in high heels chats on the phone, oblivious to the tornado approaching outside the window. That postcard initiated a series of "Tornado" drawings and paintings