Following the Brush: Connie Fox’s Paintings


By Arthur C. Danto

I learned from the great scholar and translator of Japanese literature, Donald Keene, the expression zui hitsu- ‘following the brush” – which refers to the style of composition Kenko ( a Buddhist monk of the fourteenth century) describes in the passage above, and which characterizes the book with which it begins, “Idleness” is not sloth, but rather a way of setting down thoughts. “without order or purpose,” letting ones brush find its way without being driven by poetic will towards some set end. It is a form of composition which expresses the form of life one finds evoked in Chinese paintings of an isolated figure in a smoky landscape, threading through mists punctuated by sparse trees and eccentric rocks, with no fixed destination in mind. “Following the brush” is not quite the automatic writing which Robert Motherwell took over from the Surrealists as the “original creative principle” to which he surrendered himself in what he disarmingly called “doodles”- the black loops and dashes that formed themselves spontaneously into his abstract calligraphies. But it struck me that it captures what I sense is Connie Fox’s way of going from form to form in her painting, one leading to the next, in something like the sequence of a dream. The episodes in a dream are also without any obvious order or purpose. And yet, like Kenko’s linked essays, which have no obvious or immediate connection with one another, they generate a unifying mood. Kenko’s mood is nostalgic and melancholic, Fox’s moods are brighter. Her paintings convey the mood of a season, or a time of day, or of a surrounding landscape or interior. Or all of these at once, putting the viewer inside and outside simultaneously, close up and at a distance, perceiving, remembering, feeling, and dreaming, all within the same consciousness. It is the allusiveness of painting that she cherishes, closer to the spirit of writing such as Kenko’s than to the bounded definiteness of sculpture, or to painting with sharp, clear edges.

I shall consider just one painting, Tropical Paradise (1994). The central area seems to be of an interior, in the scrubbed smoky orange with which Vuillard conveys the sense of enclosedness. But to our left, patches of blue sky are interpenetrated with wipes of the same orange, which formally unite and thematically divide the two spaces, leaving it open whether they belong outside as sunlit clouds, or inside, as part of the room’s diffuse lamplight. The same green smear defines a tree, if outside, or part of a house plant if within the interior. Above it and to one side, a darker green is definitely a plant unless it goes with the sunset, and so belongs to the landscape. The interior is sharply bounded by a curve at the right, as if a curtain were drawn back to reveal the warmth and light of domestic comfort, as in a Dutch painting. A table with an orange cloth, indifferent to the distinction of outside and inside, takes up the lower third of the space. On it are pots, a bouquet of blue flowers, two tall green stripes which could be glasses, or could be cacti. And possibly the table is spread with books. Nothing, except a picture (unless it is a mirror) on the back wall is definitive. Perhaps the artist began with it, or ended with it, to anchor things. She followed the brush, and perhaps, putting blue against orange, found that she was outside, and then, putting down some green, found that she was back inside again. It is also possible to see the entire space as loosely divided into nine panels, each with its own pictorial identity.

Like Kenko, she took one step at a time, “without order or purpose”, and that should determine how the paintings are to be seen, one thing leading to another through the different spaces through which she followed the brush’s lead. They do not feel like abstractions, for the spaces are pictorial and deep, with hints of real objects distributed through them. But there is no single space to which all these objects belong, and they are just indeterminate enough as to take on different identities, depending upon the space to which one endeavors to assign them. Inside, outside, table, curtain, wall. Firelight, sunlight, plants, pots. Sky, tree, picture. Tropical Paradise names the mood that floods this painting as the sadness of vanished things infuses the linked poetic distillations of kenko’s text. Fox’s paintings are oriental in no further sense.