When I met the artist Danny Fox four years ago, he was living in downtown LA and making work that drew heavily from the hardscrabble Skid Row world that enveloped him.
It was a world reminiscent of the LA of John Fante or Charles Bukowski, populated by barflies, burnouts and shabbily elegant coulda-shoulda-wouldas. But as a guy from England, his Britishness seemed to give him a compassionate outsider’s view of things.
Fox’s canvases use a vibrant array of colors that are tempered, or appear worn down, evoking the shadowy natures of their subjects. A skillful tightrope walker, Fox operates as both observer and participant: on a cellular level, the canvases convey that the artist is deeply intimate with the kind of life, always lived outside the ordinary, that he depicts. At same time, the structures of Fox’s compositions indicate an understanding of the painters and paintings that have come before him. The resulting work exudes a visceral synergy. "I think Danny’s work speaks intuitively to many of us because it's firmly rooted in the long lineage of painting,” says Jesper Elg, director of Copenhagen's V1 & Eighteen galleries. “When he paints a horse, I feel instantly connected to painting as a language, going back to the paintings in the Chauvet caves 30,000 years ago. He invests in, and engages this painterly language, bringing it into the realm of the contemporary.”
And then, like Monet saying au revoir to the Lily ponds, Fox left downtown LA. He didn’t go far: a little more than a year ago, Fox moved to a house in Bronson Canyon, a stone's throw from the tunnels where the original Batman TV show credits were shot. "I just ran out of juice downtown,” Fox says. “I started to see what everyone else saw, the sadness and the pain instead of things to paint. And I felt like my luck had run out too. I used to walk around Skid Row at all hours like I was bulletproof, then I got into some sticky situations and felt like it was time to move on.” But it wasn’t just a matter of personal safety, says Fox: “Above all else, it was about the work. I didn’t want to repeat myself."
Currently, Fox has two shows up, the first at Copenhagen's Eighteen Gallery, and the second, titled “The Sweet And Burning Hills,” at Alexander Berggruen in New York. Both display the shift in Fox’s technical perspective that came with his move, along with his new subjects, a cadre of slightly more polished canyon dwellers: Tali Lennox, Dylan Penn, Langley Fox, Lorraine Nicholson. With the exception of his friend and fellow artist Honor Titus, his new muses are female, and predominantly daughters of Hollywood—the type that embody a particularly beautiful sense of Los Angeles ennui.