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MARTYN FOX
ARTIST STATEMENT

Before my official art training in 1986, I used to travel on the train from Sydney’s inner west to the rarefied air of Springwood to ‘caress’ the erotic bronzes in front of Norman Lindsay’s house. Here, my love affair with the figure began and later, while tutoring at Sydney University’s Architecture Faculty, I came across the delicate yet powerful landscapes of Lloyd Rees.

At Art College, the beautiful Reg Shurr (now deceased) guided me through the subtleties of figure drawing, ‘deschooling’ my earlier Julian Ashton training. Elisabeth Cummings, the consummate abstractionist, also coached me in a different view of the landscape.

At one stage in Sydney, I was teaching five classes per week in art practice until one day, at Cardinal Freeman Village, a retired artist drew what she could see in a pile of eggs I had arranged. Her wispy drawings with faces sent me back to the studio to study spirit in art. And so I ventured to the spiritual Northern Rivers of New South Wales, and on to Celtic Scotland, where the artist Vera Coghill guided me towards the importance of play in creativity.

That has naturally led to observations of my almost-three-year-old son Jasper’s creativity and lateral learning processes. In some ways it has been Jasper’s influence that has given my current work the flavour of a children’s picture book.

My recent exhibition "Visions of the Muse" originated from a strong need to heal depression after my son’s birth. I attended a class run by Monique McCarthy on art healing through mandalas and meditation. Monique was working from Judith Cornell’s books, Mandala and Drawing the Light from Within. Using the Jungian-styled meditations within these books, and also processes described in Shaun McNiff’s Art as Medicine and Alice Miller’s Pictures of a Childhood, I have been able to access the previously intangible world of my unconscious. Similar in approach to the surrealists, and even James Gleeson’s longstanding affair with the muse, yet with less apocalyptic, more playful results.

Visions of the Muse still contains that ominous, dream-like presence, but has been described as “post contemporary in detail with an almost ‘decorative’, childlike symbology”. These are not the contemporary scratchings that people often describe as “something my child could have done”, but a true expression of a previously restrained ‘child within’. These two dozen works are quirky dreamscapes drawn from the depths of my psyche, where every line is turned into a joyous dance with the freshness of a newly realised dream.

MARTYN FOX ARTIST STATEMENT Before my official art training in 1986, I used to travel on the train from Sydney’s inner west to the rarefied air of Springwood to ‘caress’ the erotic bronzes in front of Norman Lindsay’s house. Here, my love affair with the figure began and later, while tutoring at Sydney University’s Architecture Faculty, I came across the delicate yet powerful landsca... More