When it comes to artistic ways to die, being buried under the weight of your own canvases is a pretty good one. According to Sue Webster, fellow artist Danny Fox was in danger of meeting that very fate when she visited his Kentish Town studio, packed from floor to low ceiling with works that threatened to consume the space and everyone in it. The pair had met in the local boozer a year previously, and established artist Webster had agreed to take a look at the unknown Fox’s work to offer some constructive input. She was blown away by what she found. “I felt a duty to exhume these unfamiliar masterpieces before the painter suffocated and died – another undiscovered artist suffocated by the toxicity of his own genius,’ Webster said.
Fox was raised in St Ives, and found early inspiration in the work of fisherman/artist Alfred Wallis. Where Wallis used muted blue tones, Fox’s palette is more vivid, although the two share a similarity in their representation of space. Fox’s work, infused with an early 20th Century Parisian flavour, is informed by his travels, featuring far-flung exotica and the sleazy haunts closer to home, imagined characters and the stranger-than-fiction ones to be found in the back streets and strip clubs of London. His collection Paintings is being shown at Cock’n’Bull Gallery, Shoreditch, from 17 October to 8 November.
