Steven Cox

Scottish artist Steven Cox creates stunning, textured, abstract paintings that capture the essence of the world around him. Colors seem to be born before the viewer’s eye, slowly emerging from the canvas, and melting into one another like oil swirling on pavement. Cox’s work is as much an exploration of abstraction as it is a celebration of the act of artmaking itself. His process is performative, involving methodical, carefully executed techniques and a wide range of tools at each step. The results are explosive.
It starts with a base. Cox sprays, pours, or sponges acrylic paint onto a canvas. This layer, visually stunning with luminescent colors ranging from turquoise to pink to orange in recent works, becomes the background of what will eventually be a field of rich, bumpy texture all topped with speckled and striated bands of thick oil paint. For his latest series, Cox used the pouring method to build the base.