Graham Cox

Statement

Graham Cox was born in Castleford, West Yorkshire in 1954.  He first studied art at Wakefield College of Art in 1973 before progressing to, what is now, Manchester Metropolitan university.  There he obtained a BA Hons and an MA in Fine Art along with a Post Graduate Certificate in Education.

In 1980 he moved to his current address on the Shropshire/Wales border and took up a lecturing post at North Shropshire College.  He remained at the college, lecturing in Fine Art and Art History, until 2006 when he retired in order to concentrate full time on his own work.

'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 brush stroke, the drip, the quality of the substance of the paint itself, and the surface of the canvas as a texture and a 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, analyze or 'express' an object actual or imagined.  What goes onto the canvas is not a picture but an event'.   Harold Rosenberg

'It is important to paint quicker than one can think.  Knowledge, technique, reasoning and understanding have no part in the painting process.  Only when a work is nearing its completion should such ingredients be added to the mix and they should be viewed with suspiscion and used sparingly.  Once a painting is deemed to be complete resist all temptation to revisit it'.         Graham Cox