Connie Fox: The Sammy's Beach Series

The Sammy’s Beach Series January 16 – April 11, 2021

Sammy’s Beach I, 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 88 in.

I THINK OF CONNIE FOX AS A SUPER COLLIDER OF PAINTING. She accelerates particles of line, shape, dimension, improbable hue—and, yes, rollicking humor and Zen transparency—into emanations of energy. Looking at a Connie Fox painting is to be caught up in the dust storms that whirled through her childhood. Look again, as I always want to do, and there is a transient glimpse of something unreasonable and true. You’d think the danger of lost sense and control that she’d courted as a younger painter would have subsided in the later work, but it has only intensified. Her paintings are as intimate now with primal energies as they once were with the circus of the everyday. The integrity and sheer exuberance of her life in art is exemplary and it is rare.

AMEI WALLACH, DECEMBER 2020

mysterious ways.” She continues, “Sometimes the water is quite rough and I would definitely get the feeling of rushing water. . . . When the wind is blowing, I’m struck by the power of the waves.”3 In Sammy’s Beach IV (2009), Fox’s marks on the canvas call to mind tracks and traces left on the sand. Broad sets of parallel brushstrokes seem to wash back and forth across the beige and blue painting. Glints of iridescence evoke sunlight and jingle shells reflecting in translucent waves. Faint black crisscrosses look like twigs or bird footprints, while other patterns suggest the imprint of tire treads. Toward the upper right side, Fox adhered actual sand to the canvas, near where she pulled a comb-like tool through black and gray paint, which is much like one draws in the sand.

Sammy’s Beach VIII, 2010. Acrylic on canvas, 73 x 78 in.

CONNIE FOX: THE SAMMY’S BEACH SERIES The Heckscher Museum of Art’s exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of this body of work to take place on Long Island. Fox created this group of abstract paintings and drawings between 2007 and 2014 in response to her decades of visits to Sammy’s Beach in Northwest Harbor, East Hampton. Since moving to Long Island in 1979, the artist has frequented the tidal bay beach to walk, sit, swim, and “just be” in the natural environment.1 Fox describes the paintings and drawings in the series as “a kind of homage to Sammy’s. They are not landscapes.”2 The abstractions flowed intuitively from her reservoir of observations and memories of the sea, sky, sand, and plants that she experienced there. This exhibition explores the relationship between Fox’s abstractions and Sammy’s Beach, and carefully considers the vigorous mark-making, tangled lines, dramatic color, and intensive layering that unite the series— which is as varied and dynamic as the beach itself.

Sammy’s Beach I (2007) recreates the ceaseless motion that Fox sensed at Sammy’s Beach. Without a horizon line or other recognizable spatial marker, the composition sets the viewer adrift in an elemental space. At the center, a rectangular prism appears to navigate between a tumble of blurred charcoal lines and a cascade of blue and white paint.

Diagonal lines leading to the buoyant shape suggest its trajectory. Fox explains, “I would go there every day and walk to the cut, Three Mile Harbor, and observe the boats heading out into the bay. Sammy’s is a tidal bay beach, so the water goes in and out. Swimming there was very much a part of my life, and found its way into the paintings in

Fox’s paintings do not depict naturalistic views of a place, but they are connected to Sammy’s Beach by specific forms.

For example, referring to the black and silver shapes along the horizon in Sammy’s Beach II (2009), Fox explains, “Those rectangles on the top could relate to houses visible from the beach. . . . There are things that suggest images to me. It’s a lot of memory and feeling.”4 Beneath the sky, most of the surface of Sammy’s Beach II, and also of Sammy’s Beach VIII (2010), is intensely worked with overlapping and branching lines. Fox has linked this tangled network, the most prevalent imagery in the series, to her observations of seaweed suspended in the surf, scrubby beach vegetation, and roots exposed by erosion.5 The intensity of the sunlight and shadows at Sammy’s Beach may have triggered Fox’s use of bright color and pronounced contrast between light and dark throughout the series. In Sammy’s Beach III (2009), black forms appear before a darkened band centered on a white orb. This shape’s black

Sammy’s Beach IV, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 54 x 66 in.

counterpart at the bottom of the canvas is a vortex of curves.

Washes of orange, pink, green, and yellow further electrify the painting. The work’s formidable size, otherworldly topography, and jarring colors provoke a sense of the sublime: a feeling of awe and fear at the mystery and immensity of nature. In conversation with Fox, a critic observed, “There is a ferociousness in many of these Sammy’s Beach paintings.” She replied, “There is, and that just comes from me.”6 Fox’s “Sammy’s Beach” series developed out of decades of near-daily visits to the beach. She states, “Early on I had absolutely no interest in doing any paintings that were based on Sammy’s—my paintings don’t grow out of a landscape, certainly. So it didn’t even occur to me. It was my experience there that, over time, affected me.”7 The thick layers of paint that make up the works in the “Sammy’s Beach” series give shape and texture to Fox’s accumulated memories and impressions. This effect is especially notable in Sammy’s Beach X (2012), in which the artist constructed a dense mass from multiple applications of black, blue, maroon, and green paint smeared over the ridges and drips of earlier marks.

In addition to layering, Fox expresses the breadth of her experiences at Sammy’s Beach in the seriality of her paintings and drawings, the creation of which unfolded over seven years. Each work is singular, but Fox unified the group through distinctive mark-making, line, color, and texture. The series presents Sammy’s Beach as a site of energy and movement; as a sandy surface incised and glittering; and as an expanse enmeshed in a tangle of flora. Fox pays homage—expresses respect and reverence—to Sammy’s Beach as a physical, mental, and emotional locus of life lived.

KARLI WURZELBACHER, PHD CURATOR, THE HECKSCHER MUSEUM OF ART

I’VE KNOWN CONNIE FOX for more than twelve years.

She’s a passionate and intellectual artist who has survived many generations of knowing the great abstractionists of her time. She’s not just an abstractionist; she illustrates in her work the sounds, smells and movement of the fauna and flora that exist on Sammy’s Beach on the eastern shore of Long Island. Her work is really the exploration of many years of visiting the beach every day in all kinds of weather and noting the pleasures of nature not only in seeing but in swimming and gathering information of what is under the sea and on the sea sands themselves. It’s an illustration as gestural as any handwriting could possibly be. It could be scribbles, puffs and poofs with a few soft rubs! She, more than any other artist, takes her shorthand of description that seems universal to this particular environ. If you would see her drawings (which I have admired and collected) you would somehow feel as if you’re in a very intimate spot of her mind’s vision, so unlike Gorky or De Kooning or Pollock yet a notation that is as good as it gets.

LYNDA BENGLIS, BENGLIS STUDIO, NOVEMBER 2020

CONNIE FOX AND I HAVE BEEN FRIENDS for many, many years. Every summer, for many summers, Connie, Elaine de Kooning, and myself would drive around the inlets and side-roads of the Hamptons, looking for sites to do our watercolors. Connie was always abstract, Elaine was semi-abstract, and I was the realist, always begging for more time to complete my work.

Later on, after she married Bill King, we played music together. Connie and Bill played squeaky violins and Bill also sang. Our band was called the Art Attacks and we often rehearsed in Connie’s studio where her large terrific abstract paintings lined the walls.

I spent many days and hours looking at them and realized Connie was doing something new and different. In traditional Landscape painting the space and perspective is horizontal. Connie’s paintings were vertical, and still gave the feeling of Landscape. She tilted the picture plane, setting up tension and excitement, a contradiction that Connie wanted the viewer to feel. And it’s there, really there, because standing in front of one of Connie’s paintings the viewer feels the intensity and dynamism, it is palpable.

Connie is fearless in her approach. Shapes appear, one after another, that are unique and memorable. They come out of her direct Abstract Expressionist paint experience.

The mind, the hand, the emotions—all are fused into the moment that the brush hits the canvas with an immediacy that makes the paintings vital and alive.

Weeds 7, 2010. Charcoal, ink, and acrylic on paper, 30-¼ x 44 in.

AUDREY FLACK, DECEMBER 2020

Sammy’s Beach III, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 72 in. Collection of April Gornik and Eric Fischl.

CONNIE FOX IS THE GENUINE ARTICLE, a magical being from the pre-Warhol time when art was all about art rather than celebrity, in the great tradition of the inspired interaction between painter and materials that art should represent. I have been mystified, moved, fascinated, and inspired by Connie’s work and commitment and am honored to own one of her paintings. Sammy’s Beach III is a painting that, from the first moment I saw it, stunned and fascinated me and whose depths, happily, I have barely begun to plumb.

APRIL GORNIK, NOVEMBER 2020

THE “SAMMY’S BEACH” SERIES is a remarkable recent achievement by an artist whose career spans more than seven decades. Fox was born in Fowler, Colorado, in 1925. In the 1950s, she attended graduate school and then taught at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she met artists Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) and Robert Dash (1931–2013). The two would later lure her to Long Island. With her husband, sculptor William King (1925–2015), Fox has lived and worked in East Hampton’s Northwest Woods for the last forty years. Fox’s work is held in museum collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Daura Museum of Art, University of Lynchburg, VA; Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY; and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA.

Photo by William King

The Heckscher Museum of Art would like to thank Connie Fox, Scott Chaskey, Megan Chaskey, and Levin Chaskey for their kind assistance in organizing this exhibition and publication. We are also grateful to the lenders to the exhibition, as well as to Lynda Benglis, Audrey Flack, April Gornik, and Amei Wallach for their texts.

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Unless otherwise noted, all works collection of Connie Fox. Cover image: Sammy’s Beach X, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 72 in.

Sammy’s Beach XIII, 2013. Acrylic on canvas, 26 x 25 in.

Connie Fox quoted in Joyce Beckenstein, “Connie Fox: Reckoning with Rectangles,” Woman’s Art Journal 34, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2013): 3, http:// www.jstor.org/stable/24395329.

1

2

“Sammy’s Beach Series,” artist statement, Connie Fox, accessed December 15, 2020, http://conniefoxpaintings.com/index.php?id=73.

Janet Goleas, “Talking With: Connie Fox Discusses Elaine de Kooning, Sammy’s Beach & Working within a Triangle,” Hamptons Art Hub, March 4, 2016, https://hamptonsarthub.com/2016/03/04/talking-with-connie-fox/. Fox clarified these statements in emails to the author, January 2021.

3

4

Gail Levin, Connie Fox and William King: An Artist Couple (East Hampton, NY: Guild Hall, 2016), 26.

Goleas, “Talking With,” 2016; Jennifer Landes, “Connie Fox on Sammy’s Beach,” East Hampton Star, April 15, 2014, https://www.easthamptonstar. com/archive/connie-fox-sammys-beach; Fox speaks about roots and erosion in a 2013 interview filmed by Levin Chaskey. I thank him for sharing it with me.

5

6

Goleas, “Talking With,” 2016.

7

Ibid.