Philip Cox Paintings at Simon Chan
Architects imagine themselves custodians of ‘the mother of all arts’. Very few architects dare to apply their thinking outside their chosen discipline.
A degree of confidence, a calling, will drive results to a degree however, without sufficient experience in handling material, no cohesive visual language will emerge with that intent.
In viewing Philip Cox’s paintings, the viewer is immediately struck by the landscapes themselves but also the way in which those landscapes are viewed, experienced and felt by the artist.
A painting represents the way in which the experience of looking at a landscape is ‘synthesised’.
The paintings employ observation which is wrought gesturally. Subject is not spelt out or illustrated.
The use of gesture allows the artist to be immersed, to be at one, to have surrendered to the landscape as an insider. They are not trying to own it by naming it as their colonising aunts and uncles may have done.
Philip Cox is not owning this land by painting it. He is listening to it and feeling it. It is cold or hot, still and breezy. If it is not filled with birdsong one can at least hear the leaves rustling, the distant waves thumping the sand.
All art stands for what it has achieved. It also acts as a promise for what will follow while the artist remains alive.
‘’Menindi’
This work is courageously unsightly with its crude blue and red sky and land demarcations. The scratchy vegetation shows the determination of plants to leave an unfavourable impression on the viewer. We are grateful for shade provided. We only wish the ground on which we lay brought some pleasure from shelter provided..
The paintings in this exhibition are modestly scaled and are painted on paper. Modest ambition mostly proves to be the most productive however, these paintings provide the scope for a hand and wrist gesture. Scaled up they would give scope to what the arm and the body might bring to the discussion in terms of ‘embodying’ the landscape and I look forward to seeing the way in which those actions are employed, perhaps.
The works in this exhibition are an account of the experience of being in the landscape. Also they are an account of the influences of other artists that guided these results.
There is a history here of trying to understand what it is for us to be here, in this place, pictorially. Any contribution to this discussion is much appreciated.
‘Thubbul Garden
This painting is more than the description of a place. It shows what it feels like to be in it, to walk through it, to be at one, with it. One senses the artist’s smile.