The Flash of an Idea: the Paintings of Connie Fox

By Donna de Salvo

For Connie Fox, the formal aspects of painting- line, color and composition- are one way of ringing order to disorder. For some time, she has charted the language of abstraction and figuration through vibrant colors, overgrown suggestive forms, and vigorous paint application. While her work embodies the modernist dilemma, with its struggle between representation and abstraction, Fox finds this a challenge. Such visual problems are a kind of riddle to her, in which, “I can relate to anything.”

After graduating from the University of Colorado, Fox left her native state to attend school in Los Angeles where she first encountered the work of Surrealist artists Max Ernst, Rene Magritte and Yves Tanguy. Their exploration of the world of dreams and the unconscious mind would play a major role in the formation of Fox’s art. “Cocteau’s realm was interior, a charged void: Fellini’s was exterior. Cocteau was concerned with the inner alteration of things, Fellini with a profusion of real elements in a real world.”

While a student at the University of New Mexico, fox met the painter Elaine de Kooning, who was teaching there. This meeting would eventually have an impact on Fox’s life. Fox had lived and worked in a variety of places- Albuquerque, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Denmark. By 1971, she had her first show on Long Island’s East End at the Elaine Benson Gallery. Looking for a lively art scene, in 1980, she moved to East Hampton, New York, where she presently resides, an area she had become familiar with through her friendship with Elaine de Kooning. Since the nineteenth century, the region has played host to many artists. During the post-World War II era, a number of proponents of abstract Expressionism established studios there, including Elaine and Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. Living in East Hampton, Fox has said, “Coming to the East end meant I was focusing more and more elements- there was a sturdiness to the whole process of painting.”

As an artist who came of age in the 1950’s world of Abstract Expressionism, Fox has remained steady in her commitment to the painterly process. Fox begins each painting rarely knowing what the final work will look like, often inspired by the “flash of an idea, a word, or some other visual stimuli,” such as an image seen from the corner of her eye while riding on a train. She has said that what she likes most is “incongruity and poetic juxtaposition, fugitive shifting images, and an arena where chance, memory, desire and coincidence come together.” Her willingness to allow the images of her unconscious mind to drive the drips and splatters of painting add to the sense of immediacy in her work. Standing in front of one of her pictures, the zealous forms and intense, almost blinding colors, produce a physical, as well as a psychological response in the viewer- the sense of being in the moment is overwhelming.

Many times, remembered objects will assert themselves into the picture plane of her paintings. Proust’s Birthday Seven is from a series first begun in 1988. When something resembling a birthday cake appeared in the painting, Fox thought the title seemed apt. Marcel Proust is the late nineteenth century French novelist who authored “Remembrance of Things Past,” a sixteen volume narrative exploring involuntary memory, or what occurs when a new encounter with something already experienced allows the past to be recalled.
Although the artist frequently gives each painting a title while she is working on them, this is mostly for pragmatic reasons as she tends to work on as many as five at once. In the end, titles such as Yellow Pyramid or Hammer may suggest something that appears in the work, but the artist has no interest in applying any kind of fixed meaning. Fox has said, “I’m interested in the object turned abstract and multiple possible meanings.”

The opportunity to view Fox’s work, in the exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery and The Parrish Art Museum could not be better timed. Fox’s work offers us the opportunity to see what painting can be. In the flash of an idea, we are allowed to enter into the world she constructs out of disparate forms and paint.