Shady characters and sleazy scenarios in Danny Fox's intense new show

Date
7 October 2014

To stare into a Danny Fox painting is like waking up in a world written by Charles Bukowski on a particularly heavy bender. There’s sex and drinking and guns, plus boxers and strippers and cowboys; here a horse, there a tiger. It’s intense and unnerving and exciting, but although there’s something very contemporary about Danny’s paintings, his rise to prominence owes a great deal to the support of a more well-established artist (an age-old route for up-and-coming artistic stars).

Sue Webster met Danny in a pub and describes him thus: “He had long greasy biker length hair, a mouthful of metal and adorned himself with handmade prison tattoos.” But when she visited his canvas-crammed studio in Kentish Town, she realised quite what she had stumbled across back in the boozer. “There was simply no more room to breathe and I felt a duty to exhume these unfamiliar masterpieces before the painter suffocated and died – another undiscovered artist suffocated by the toxicity of his own genius.’”

Danny’s work is going on show at the Cock ’n’ Bull gallery in east London later this month, where you can take the leap into his unusual and atmospheric world. Raised in St Ives he was influenced by the work Alfred Wallis and taught himself to draw when his grandma gave him a piece of paper and a pencil when he complained of being bored.

Despite not drawing a human until he was 15 (his first girlfriend), now Danny’s canvases are populated by all manner of shady characters. As Edward Lucie Smith puts it: “ What gives particular pleasure here is just what is stimulating about aspects of early Parisian modernism – genuine cultural seriousness, mixed with a degree of mischievous sleaze.”

Danny Fox Painting at the Cock ’n’ Bull Gallery runs from 17 October to 8 November.

Above

Danny Fox: Untitled

Above

Danny Fox: Untitled

Above

Danny Fox: Untitled

Above

Danny Fox: Untitled

Above

Danny Fox: Untitled

Above

Danny Fox: Untitled

Above

Danny Fox: Untitled

Share Article

About the Author

Rob Alderson

Rob joined It’s Nice That as Online Editor in July 2011 before becoming Editor-in-Chief and working across all editorial projects including itsnicethat.com, Printed Pages, Here and Nicer Tuesdays. Rob left It’s Nice That in June 2015.

It's Nice That Newsletters

Fancy a bit of It's Nice That in your inbox? Sign up to our newsletters and we'll keep you in the loop with everything good going on in the creative world.