Artists You Need to Know

Remembrances of Things Past
Connie Fox, who’s now in her 80s, remembers her early life in the Dust Bowl when the wind blew clouds of soil, called “black rollers,” through her Colorado town. While the village ladies predicted the end of the world, six-year-old Connie found it “kind of interesting.”
She also marveled at the tumbleweed that rolled over the prairie. The idea of these “3-D balls of strands, almost transparent,” made an impression that still lingers. A look at the artist’s abstract paintings reveals the ghost of such images.

Recollections of the many other places she’s lived or visited – the Rockies of New Mexico; the Pacific Ocean and “swaying palms” of Southern California; Europe; rural Denmark; the Berkeley Hills, and the Ohio River — “all live within her, in a Proustian sense,” according to her web site. “These memories lend themselves to abstraction, not directly, they’re ingredients of the paintings,” she said in a recent conversation.

Fox was an art student in New Mexico when Elaine de Kooning arrived there to teach. “She brought the Abstract Expressionist brush stroke with her – the new language. We became fast friends and remain so.” It was de Kooning who convinced Fox to move to the East End.

Fox has enjoyed a long and critically acclaimed career, and has had a life well lived, much of that with the celebrated sculptor Bill King, who died last year at age 90. She is also the mother of Megan Chaskey, a poet whose latest book cover, Birdsong Under the Wisdom Tree, features one of her mother’s paintings. Why did her daughter choose that particular work? “Probably because it’s dramatic and mysterious,” muses Fox.

Of course the South Fork has filtered its way into her work. Her “Sammy’s Beach” series is “based on long years of my walking there – where the sand meets the water.”

You can see a slice of Fox’s work at the Parrish Art Museum this month as part of its Parrish Perspectives (March 13 – April 24). The show features 22 smallish drawings the artist made in 2007 using a mirror and bookstand, and which she donated to the museum’s permanent collection. She laughs, explaining that the pieces are “a million miles away from my usual work,” which consists of very large abstract paintings. She is still not sure where the idea came from – possibly the self-portraits of German artist Max Beckmann or photographs of the French writer Colette.

Napeague Modernist
Born in London, award-winning painter Lachlan Thom who has studios in New York and Napeague, has studied art in New York, Italy, Oregon and the U.K., and taken his brushes to Prague, Vienna, Tuscany, Barcelona, Bali, and Morocco. He moved recently to Napeague for the “light and the surf.”
He has shown extensively internationally and last March was one of only two contemporary artists to be represented in the inaugural exhibition of Rosenberg & Co. in New York, which tapped into the rich heritage of gallerist Marianne Rosenberg’s progenitors, harking back to her great grandfather, a legendary Parisian art dealer who championed such legends as Cezanne, Manet, and Van Gogh.
The show, “Inspired by History,” “introduced the public to the historical heritage and breadth of the gallery’s program by including Impressionist, Modern, and contemporary works.” Among the artists represented were such masters as Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Max Weber.
“Lachlan Thom is an emerging artist whom we have helped guide and advise,” says the gallery’s director, Preeya Seth. “His paintings are defined by a vision and aesthetic unique to Lachlan but also reference the Modernist tradition.”

The artist says that he is “making pictures about vision and our expectations of modernity” with a deep nod to technology. ‘We are now adjusting our vision and experience to high contrast screens and cartoons… a joining of the natural and the synthetic. Making pictures connects us to nature.” For upcoming shows: [email protected]

Magical Mist
You can see the influences of her native Ireland in the works of Sag Harbor painter Roisin Bateman, whose memories of the “magical land” of her birthplace with its “soft light, mist, and rain” find their way onto her canvases.

But you can also see how her work is affected by her adopted home on the South Fork of Long Island. “Even though my work is nonrepresentational, it’s informed by landscape and changes in weather around me,” she says. During long walks on Barcelona Neck or ocean beaches, she soaks in the elements “as they play off each other.” The changing nature of the sand, sea, sky, light, even bird flight, address her overriding theme of metamorphosis. “Each painting unfolds as a plant might grow,” she says. “Step by step.”

And as the seasons change, so does her approach. Over time, she says, her colors have become more muted and complex. Finding cloudy, misty weather now during late winter, she finds herself working with “a lot of thin veils of color” where the “edges are less distinct.”

Perhaps her favorite time of year is summer when she spends time at the Art Barge in Amagansett. Though she teaches painting at the John Jermain Library in Sag Harbor, Bateman prefers to take, not teach, classes there. “It’s like a mini-vacation.” She loves walking the Napeague dunes, which remind her of the seascape and bog near where she grew up in Connemara. “Everything I see works its way into my painting.”