Danny Fox's large-scale canvases take on larger-than-life characters, distilling their complexity down to a vivid and expressive collection of brushstrokes. He tells writer Maisie Skidmore about his search for truth in unexpected places—from the pub, boxing rings and deserts, to the streets of Skid Row.
When Danny Fox and I speak, on a bright Thursday morning in April, he’s spiritually sandwiched between two exhibitions. One, “Kingdom,” a mini retrospective and the artist’s first institutional show to date, recently opened at Plymouth University. It looked closely at Cornwall, where Fox was born and raised; loaning back a number of works made six, seven years ago, the artist had the chance to see them in a new light. The next is due to open at Hannah Barry Gallery in September. What will be in it, I ask him? He answers without a moment’s hesitation: “Good fucking question!”
This pace and pressure are nothing new for Fox. He’s been exhibiting once a year, every year, for the past 25 years. The work he makes is raw and poignant—large-scale cinematic vignettes, riffing off ritual and recognizable environments from pubs to boxing rings, fuelled by a search for truth.
Words and pictures have always flowed together in his practice. He stopped using sketchbooks years ago: instead, he makes notes, miniature paintings and collages on sheets of loose leaf paper, which he pins up around his studio while he works. He calls them studio notes. He does not call them poems, even though some of them—phrases, words, written images—are poetic, and closely resemble poetry. The words tend to come first—he’ll scribble them down while out and about, in the hopes that they evoke an image later on. Symbolism has an important part to play too; majestic horses, in particular, have become a recurring motif. “I keep saying I'm done with them, because I don't want to repeat myself forever. But they keep finding a way of being new to me.”
Reading about his work, you’d be forgiven for believing him to be an “outsider artist”–a term the art industry arrogantly bestows on the self-taught—those driven to create out of a primal urge, untrained and unconstrained. But while Fox operates from the edges—the edge of the establishment, the edge of the country—it’s evident he does so with a rich understanding of what happens on the inside.
“That always surprises me,” he says, of being called an outsider artist, “because it’s just not the case. I had a deep education in art—I just had to give it to myself. I was born into a kind of art world in St Ives, I understood a lot of it from a really young age. If anything, that’s what made me take an outside lane.” He grew up opposite the one-time home of Alfred Wallis, his hero—an artist and fisherman who began, without any training, painting harbour scenes onto scraps of cardboard at the age of 70. “He’s probably the most famous outsider artist in Britain,” he adds, “but to me, he wasn’t an outsider. He was king of the world.”
Fox moved back to Cornwall in 2020, after 17 or so years elsewhere—in Cardiff, Hastings, London, followed by (after an unexpected eviction from his London flat) five years in Los Angeles. It was a fruitful time to be an artist there. “Everyone was going to LA,” he says. “It was a good time.” In the paintings he made there, the rich vibrancy of his palette gave way to more muted tones. “The colors changed. I was working downtown, and everything has this faded color to it, you know, because the sun’s so harsh.”
His subjects in LA reflected that environment, too. His studio was in Skid Row, an area with one of the largest populations of unhoused people anywhere in the US. The characters he came into contact with day-to-day there found their way into his paintings. “They’re very interesting-looking, a lot of the time, so they appeal to the painter,” he says. “They dress in crazy clothes, for want of a better word, or no clothes. And they kind of pose themselves; they might be laying down in the street, or sitting in a chair. They’re not rushing from A to B, like everyone else.” I press him on what draws him to them. “Put it this way: a lot of mad people are only dealing with truth. Once you take away all the other layers of stuff that we tell ourselves to get through, and you’re stood on the street corner screaming the truth—that’s when you’re perceived as insane, you know? You got to play the game in order to get through.”
If the truth is the bubbling centre of the volcano, Fox’s work often feels like it’s teetering on the edge, looking in. “Whenever I make something that’s good, at first I'm like, ‘Surely not. That’s madness.’ Then the next day, you come back into the studio and you’re like, ‘Shit, it’s got something to it’. And it turns out to be the best thing you’ve made.”
I ask him what that process looks like—how those pieces come to be. “If I knew, I’d be in there making ten paintings a day,” he says. “I was in the studio for eight hours yesterday, absolutely defeated, staring at this big white canvas, and I didn’t make a mark. There are things you can do—but yesterday I didn’t do any of them. I just sat with it and let it beat me, because I thought maybe that was the answer.”
When we speak, he’s on his way back to the studio. How’s he feeling about that blank canvas? “I’ll be back in there,” he says. “Just put that.”