The Great Atlantic Map Works Gallery

Peter Fox received his art education at Kettering Technical College and Falmouth School of Art, where he graduated in Painting and Printmaking in 1982. He has been a professional artist ever since. He lives and works in West Cornwall.

“I have been making paintings, prints and assemblage artworks in Cornwall since 1980 (Falmouth School of Art 1979-1982).

“I refer to myself as a contemporary primitive, which may sound like a contradiction in terms, but here is a belief that there must be a recognition of the primal in a technological age.

“My earliest box constructions referenced the work of Joseph Cornell, a key figure in the genre of art and the box. One such piece was entitled “CTHONIC BOX” (the title refers to earth spirits) and contained all sorts of found objects.

“The natural world has always been a fascination to me, but I have no wish to emulate nature. I therefore tend to identify with non-western artistic traditions and the ancient art of Europe.

“A non-anthropocentric world view is at the core of my thinking, and making connections with the animal archetype is key to developing a symbolic visual language.

The Redwing has become a totem bird, with its connection to the north, a recognition of the impact that northern cultures have had on our own, similarly the wolf, a misunderstood animal and a potent symbol of the wildness of nature.”

www.greatatlantic.co.uk/peterfox09

A critique:

“Peter Fox is a painter and printmaker whose work is different from that of most other artists, for whereas theirs belongs solely to the world of studios and galleries, Peter’s seems to grow from some substratum of myth and rough magic quite outside the currents of his time.

“In his woodcuts the images seem to have lain in the earth for generations. In them one can smell the rank fur of these wild creatures and watch, if only for a moment, the slithering of a lizard. All of nature is here in its power and primaeval strangeness: the sun and the moon, the stars, snakes and ammonites, the bare branches of trees harsh against a white sky; a horned stag too, upon whose back a black crow has landed and a chalice and a crown.

“The sense of something mythical about his images is also always potent. Some are specifically mythological; an image of the death of Balder, the sun god, by a mistletoe dart, is an example but, more commonly, the landscapes, if uninhabited, yet seem those through which the great mythic heroes might have lived and hunted.

“Everything suggests an ancestral world. This is a trickier task than mere illustration since, like a medium, the artist has to conjure resonances out of thin air. Yet time and again Peter succeeds in so doing: the juxtaposition of a few simple elements – a row of bare branched trees, a running hare, a razor sharp beaked raven and a tower on fire – creates a visual cryptogram no less disturbingly poetic than, for example, the Gundesrup Cauldron. Come to think of it, the work of Peter Fox, though not in the least eclectic, has the kind of wild vigour we associate with the Celts, an animal physicality and compulsion. For me they disturb, re-energise and delight.”

John Lane
Author of A Snake’s Tail full of Ants
(Art, Ecology and Consciousness)
Founder and Editor of Resurgence Magazine.