Being a Short Diversion on the Art of Rob Cox

Born in 1957 in Stoneham, MA, Cox received his B.F.A. in Painting and Art History from the Massachusetts College of Art. In 1990, he moved to San Francisco and continued his studies at the University of California Extension, Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Rob’s work is a Pop style with muddy underpinnings. It germinates in the works of Paul Cezanne, David Park and Richard Diebenkorn. Representational painting is a foundation to push images beyond their literal explanation and then pull back into the object to create a restrained tension of something slightly off kilter. He sees the thing as new, somehow more precious than the original.

About how his work is always evolving:

“I’ve been putting brush to canvas for fifty years.  As a young boy I recall the smell of linseed oil and oil paint, and I liked the way I could accurately represent something that I was looking at with pencil and paint.  I liked the way the paint felt on the brush as I smeared the paint to the canvas. As I grew older I enjoyed drawing and the way a line could describe objects and express a feeling.

When I began studying art in college I was drawn to painting as a process of expression. What excited me, what drew me in, were the same things that excited me when I was a young boy: paint, color and line. And while I have done abstract canvases, figurative work has always been my strongest interest.

Over the years my styles and subjects have evolved and veered wildly into different genres, different influences. I ‘ve studied Matisse and Cezanne, Monet and Manet trying to glean whatever I could from their techniques and styles.

But constantly most influential influences have been the painters of the Bay Are Figurative movement: painters that use the medium to describe objects and subjects and also use those same objects and subjects to describe the paint as expression.

I have aspired to create work without gimmicks.  It’d be simple to churn out stylistically similar images using the same patterns and rhythms, but I would easily tire of repeating myself and I believe others would also”.  

Strongly influenced by Wayne Thiebaud, Elmer Bischoff and Park, he also studied with Bruce McGaw at SFAI. And so Rob continues the Northern California figurative tradition. Paint is applied impasto with aggressive strokes, in broad swaths. The objective is to describe and define form and shape using color.

Rob Cox's paintings have been exhibited at the George Krevsky Gallery in San Francisco and in exhibits in Ojai, CA and in Tucson and Scottsdale, AZ. His work has been included in juried exhibits at the Center for Visual Art in Oakland, CA as well as the Makeready Press Gallery in Montclair, NJ.