Experiments in New England

Gardner Cox, 46, is a talented Massachusetts painter with a happy outlook and a common-sensical approach to art that New Englanders can admire. To earn a living, he paints commission portraits of famous figures and Boston's citizens; the rest of his time he spends experimenting with abstractions and searching for new ways to express himself. At Cape Cod's new Mayo Hill Galleries last week, people got a chance to see how the portraiture and experiments had turned out.

It was hard to say which were more successful. Though there were only a few oil portraits in the show (Cox has done such celebrities as Harvard President James B. Conant, Judge Learned Hand, Dean Acheson), it was plain that he is no mere bread & butter portraitist. The pictures had a carefree, almost dashed-off look: lots of lively colors, some swift lines brushed in with a spare and sure touch. What they lacked in detail was made up in warmth and spontaneity. In a painting of his young daughter Kate, prim and neat in a party dress, Cox had added off to one side a quick sketch of her playing in the buff which deftly caught the uninhibited side of three-year-olds. Even in a portrait, says Cox, "you're trying for something universal."

The idea of universality pushes out most strongly in Cox's abstractions. He paints what he calls "basics," e.g., canvases combining such forms as rocks and eggs, which offer contrast in texture. ("Eggs," he says, "have a softness and smoothness and at the same time a nervous feeling.") He is also fond of beach still lifes, in which he tries for harmonies of color, e.g., the whites of clamshells, the browns of crabs. Each is an experiment in style and technique. In a painting called Dew, he set pastel droplets on a gauzelike spiderweb; in another, he suspended a flowering atomic symbol over an enormous egg standing on an infinite plain. New England approves of Cox's experiments. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, which buys little contemporary art, has a Cox "basic," and several pieces in his current exhibit have already been spoken for.

Last week Gardner Cox himself was hidden away on an island off the Maine coast, busy with portraits and abstractions, recording trials & errors in his journal. His wife and four children were with him, and, when their father could pry them away from the sailboat races, they sat for more portraits. Fee: 60-c- an hour, with deductions of a cent a minute for wriggling.

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