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.

Rob Cox paints the urban landscape as well as figures and everyday objects. He believes that painting is about paint. "It's about the application of colors and pigment to the surface. I want the viewer to see the process of painting. The scumbled brush strokes and lumps of paint are as integral to the work as the illusion of a roadway in the distance."

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:

“When working I have an idea, a tenuous notion about what will transpire on the canvas. As the work progresses, the piece becomes something on its own. A dialog begins between my hand and what happens on the canvas.

“Part of what I love about the medium of paint is the mixing of colors. The process of painting becomes alchemy. Piling on the paint, a gesturing, flourishing brush stroke against smooth surfaces, bright grays and dull reds and a patchwork of passages that create context for the images. And I oscillate between the theoretical and physical activity of painting. I struggle constantly not only with what to paint, but how to paint.”

Strongly influenced by Wayne Thiebaud, Elmer Bischoff and Park, he 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 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.

Meditations on the Sea

A series of paintings by Rob Cox

Autumn 2009-Summer 2010

As I began these paintings my hope was to communicate my thoughts and feelings about the sea onto the canvas. The challenge of course was to not fall into a traditional seascape formula and still communicate a visceral visual experience.

These paintings have an interesting flow. There is a play of perspective between foreground, middle ground and background. There is a sense of the fluidity of a rolling wave yet the rhythm is unclear. Even now I feel as if I am at the waters edge balancing on a thin line between observed and abstract.

A figure painter all my life, I needed to connect with something. In fact I have several older drawings and paintings that foreshadow this work of using the ocean as subject or subtext. For several years now I have made sketches and notes about the sea and sky intent on translating those references into paintings. I have always considered these writings and sketches small meditations on the sea.

There are paintings and painters that inform this stylistic shift: Mark Rothko’s color fields; Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series; and the soaring paintings of J.M.W. Turner are paintings that can hold me spellbound for long periods of time. They allow me into a place where the emotional and intellectual engage in an understanding of shared quiet excitement. Where there may be a calming sense of peace, a sense of balance and potential.

I have a healthy respect for the sea. Its power and majesty are evident to any casual observer of the surf line. Its bounty and depth have been a mystery for millenniums. I can sit and contemplate the sea for hours on end letting my thoughts bound from wave to wave, shimmer to shimmer. Watching as the movement and flow of the surface creates mindfulness, a deep awareness of presence that, in the normal day–to–day, is difficult to absorb.

In a larger sense this work challenges me to push beyond and to experience the nature of the sea. It invites me to experience the movement and the power, the tranquility and the danger, the vitality and the allure that draws us – inexplicably - toward the shoreline and salt air and to experience the sound and smell, to contemplate the endless movement and the infinite expanse.