Coby Cox: Drawings
Gallery on Q
- Peter S. Briggs -
Amidst a pile of boulders near the center of Arizona’s Petrified Forest is Newspaper Rock, upon which animals, humans and geometric patterns appear among hundreds of surrounding petroglyphs, all etched between 650 and 2,000 years ago. Pictographs of humans and other animals also cover the deep recesses of Altamira cave in northern Spain, some dating back as far as 200 centuries. In southwestern Minnesota, prehistoric figures pecked in stone at Jeffers Petroglyphs Historic Site look like elastic humans stretched across exposed quartzite, perched just inches above tall prairie grass. The tantalizing suggestiveness of such ancient markings nourishes their attraction. Books and articles chronicle our ability—and, more commonly, our inability—to understand or interpret such drawings. Our powerlessness to achieve unambiguous understanding—to crystallize a clear storyline—feeds speculative curiosity. This interpretative adventure is enriched by each journey or pilgrimage to a site, which nurtures robust expectations.
On a recent First Friday tour of galleries in Lubbock, I walked into Gallery on Q, an alternative space near the heart of downtown. Expectations had grown rather dim earlier in the evening but here, my pessimism quickly evaporated. Two hundred and twenty drawings by Coby Cox, created over a six-month period in 2003 and 2004, lined the parallel walls of the gallery’s front room. Unframed and pinned directly to the walls, Cox’s drawings covered them almost completely, from floor to ceiling. On white, blue and beige paper and corrugated board, Cox’s accumulation of marks sheathed the space’s interior. The forms and shapes in these images seem vaguely familiar. Gestures of charcoal—frequently but subtly highlighted with chalk, marker or ink—outline remnants of humanlike figures: limbs, heads, torsos and more. Ambiguous anthropomorphic forms approach dreamlike re-creations of aliens outfitted as humans as if residual aspects of our species but still not quite us.
Coby Cox, Drawings, 2005
Installation view, Gallery on Q
Cox’s numerous but modest drawings, the largest being 18-x-24 inches, line up in exacting rows, much like the excised pages of a single book. Large works are mounted high; smaller works appear at the bottom of the walls. Like classic petroglyphs, these mute images feed one another, provoking insatiable narratives. As individual drawings, the majority of them possess the eloquent spontaneity of an artist seemingly at ease with impulsiveness. The tension and juxtaposition between the pulse of the individual drawings and the discipline of their cellular presentation begs for a storyline.
Cox tweaks his parsimonious charcoal gestures with smudges that create subtle ranges of values and heighten the play between figure and ground. This evocation of Ab-Ex related drawing suggests a pantheon of mid-twentieth-century heroic lineages—the sum of which could easily become pretentious. But in the spirit of historical context, these drawings do suggest the discernible confidence that pervades Franz Kline’s black and white works on paper, an elusive sense of space that reminds one of Arshile Gorky and a gestural fluidity that evokes the early drawings of Philip Guston.
Not unlike this pantheon, Cox’s working method also evolved within a visceral environment where the movement of his hand and arm simply and intuitively extends his physical and mental state of being. The artist notes that he is “interested in capturing the most elusive aspects of human nature, aspects that are observable both internally and externally…” These works bear well upon this sincere pursuit.
The incentive to create stories—to link one moment to the next in some meaningful and literal way—seems ever-present. Encountering a string of things presented without a narrative often obliges a description that grounds itself in experiential relationships. But good science—like good art—has the enviable tendency to undermine the easy, popular, acceptable or conventional. Prehistoric stone drawings perplex us precisely because our stock of narratives does not embrace them without effort. Similarly, Cox’s drawings captivate through the richness of their physical presence, which lures us toward a satisfying ambiguity.