Project Description

Peter Fox Solo – June 2015

Peter Fox presents some new work in his solo show.

‘Thylacine’ is one of Peter Fox’s petroglyphs, that is drawings on stone, in this case recycled slate, on which he has inscribed a symbol for extinction below a delicately precise picture of the Thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, the last of which died in Hobart Zoo, Tasmania in 1933.

The last but one thylacine, a wolf like animal, had been shot by a farmer. Peter Fox describes his world view as a biocentric rather than an anthropocentric world view, seeing all life forms as important and he clearly empathises with the plight of this lone wolf, imprisoned in a cage, the last of its kind. Other animals in his pictures include wolves, newts and lizards. His sympathies are with the Green movement.

Another more colourful example of his work is ‘Thank you for the rhythm and the drums’ and the

title is written in Spanish on the picture, ‘Gracias para ritmo y tambor’. Here we see a celebration of Peter Fox’s love of music: he plays in Quijada, a band which performs ‘son’ music, Cuban style, a music which uses repetition and cyclic patterns in a hypnotically infectious enjoyable way.

Parallel attributes apply to these paintings in which strong solid colours are contained by outlines and he uses a mysterious undeciphered language as if from some yet to be discovered civilisation. Peter Fox draws on symbols from around the world, being interested in cultural myths, and adds his own symbols to express in art what he finds is not expressible in words. He often includes birds and the sun as giver of life, drums, comets, and animals, arranging them subtly to make formal echoes and patterns in the picture space, different ways of reading perspective playing against one another. The colours are sonorous and glowing, applied with care. Peter Fox acknowledges the influence of Alan Davie but without using the latter’s more messy wild application of paint.

No one else around is painting like this; it is Peter Fox, a shaman in his own world, inviting us to enjoy his discoveries and move imaginatively to the rhythms and harmonies of his visual music.