Graham Cox

Born in Castleford, West Yorkshire in 1954. Studied art and design at Wakefield College of Art (Foundation Diploma 1974), Manchester Met University (BA Hons Fine Art 1977, MA in Fine Art 1978, Post Graduate Certificate in Education 1979). 1980 – 2006 Employed as a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art/Art History at North Shropshire College.
Has lived on the Shropshire/Wales border from 1980 and continued to paint and exhibit. Took early retirement from work in 2006, had a studio built and now paints on a full time basis.
Recent successes have included being a prizewinner for the MoMA (Wales) ‘Open’ in 2008, reaching the final stages of selection for the John Moores 2010 exhibition and appearing on the BBC2 programme ‘Show Me the Monet’ in 2011. Also shown work at the Royal Academy, Serpentine Gallery, Air Gallery (all London) as well as the City Galleries of Leeds, Wakefield, Sheffield and Manchester.

Approach to painting:

‘The consciousness of the personal and spontaneous…stimulate the artist to invent devices of handling, processing, surfacing, which confer to the utmost degree the aspect of the freely made. Hence the importance of the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip, the quality of the substance of the paint itself, and the surface of the canvas as a texture and field of operation – all signs of the artist’s active presence…The impulse…becomes tangible and definite on the surface of the canvas through the painted mark. We see, as it were, the track of emotion, its obstruction, persistence or extinction’.

Meyer Schapiro

‘At a certain moment the canvas begins to appear as an arena in which to act
- rather than a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyse or ’express’ an object actual or imagined. What goes onto the canvas is not a picture but an event. The big moment comes when one decides to paint………just to PAINT. One begins such a picture with absolute ‘nothingness’. Then in a kind of improvised dialogue with the painting one begins to paint, the brush is dictated by what Vasily Kandinsky termed ‘inner necessity’ until no other stroke is required and the picture is finished. What gives such painting’s their meaning is the way one organises their emotional and intellectual energy as if they were in a living situation. In the end the painter might find reflected the true image of his/her identity’

Harold Rosenberg

It is important to work at a quicker pace than one can think. It is only then that one can erradicate knowledge, logic and understanding. None of these elements should be present in the process but should be withheld until the process is complete.
Use these ingridients sparingly when analysing the final outcome and resist revisiting the finished painting at all costs.

Graham Cox

website. www.grahamcox.isendyouthis.com