By Norm Powers
Photos By Steve Mann
Simplicity may be a virtue in daily life, but when it comes to making art, it can be a credo. Basic forms, an uncluttered palette and elementary composition are powerful tools in the right hands, creating a greater impact than any amount of rococo swirl or baroque excess. It’s a lesson that Asheville artist Ralston Fox Smith took to heart. "I paint with three simple things in mind: light, color and geometry," the 44-year-old New Hampshire native says. "Keep it basic, do it well, and the results transcend reality."
Fox, as he prefers to be called, uses these elemental building blocks to produce powerful statements in oil, which simultaneously refer to the tensions between humans and nature — and the common bonds between them. Last Stand, for example, hints at the ravages of clear-cutting with its bleak arrangement of stumps in the foreground, but suggests — in the proud stance of the stately autumn-tinged trees in the background — that all may not be lost. The composition is washed in Fox’s palette of natural greens, reds and blues, and serves as an invitation to the viewer to enter the forest and leave the depredations of civilization behind.
Trees, in fact, are a recurring theme in Fox’s work. Symbols of endurance and patience, they were the stalwart companions of his childhood. The small farm in rural New Hampshire where he was raised imparted Fox’s first and deepest inspiration. "Being born and raised in New England immersed me into a world of antiquity from the start," Fox says, "a world of colonial, hand-crafted furniture, houses, winding roads, places and things both beautiful and original."
There were long rambles in nearby woods with a birding-enthusiast uncle and frequent visits to the rugged New Hampshire seacoast, only a few miles away. Fox’s college years at Amherst College, in the heart of western Massachusetts’ spectacular Connecticut River Valley, at the southern cusp of the Berkshires, made sure his youthful love of nature would remain with him into adulthood. "I constantly explored and hiked the area, relishing both private spots and public — like the view of the Connecticut River’s Oxbow which was painted by Thomas Cole," Fox recalls.
Leaving Amherst with a fine arts degree and eventually arriving in Los Angeles at the Santa Monica College of Design, Art and Architecture, Fox learned the brilliant palettes and bold lines of Chicano art from Frank Romero, one of the founders of L.A.’s "Los Four" movement of the 1970s and ‘80s. He became absorbed by the serene polished surfaces of Laddie John Dill’s sculptural art, fashioned from aluminum, bronze and glass. Under Dill’s tutelage, Fox produced his first landscapes in oil, larger in scale than his present work, which reproduced the open skies and fields of his eastern boyhood, set amidst the urban confines of Los Angeles. Photography also attracted him as another exploratory tool for investigating the relationship between natural elements, and still forms a part of his creative output.
In 1999, after settling in Asheville with his wife Robin and their two children, he found fresh inspiration and a cleaner, bolder approach in the Blue Ridge. "I’ve been drawn to the artists that were pure in their vision and execution," Fox says, citing Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent and Marsden Hartley as artistic kin. Although Hopper is most widely known for his bleak depictions of lonely urban settings, Fox found Hopper’s landscapes of the Maine seacoast more compelling. "His ability to make a mundane group of hills and trees come to life and sing was what made me a follower," Fox says. "Hopper, Kent and Hartley were transitional artists, painting old-world subjects with a modernistic flair."
It’s a fair description of Fox’s own work. More than one of Fox’s canvases teeters on the border between the figurative and the abstract. Midday Moon, among the works produced after Fox’s move to Asheville, plays with traditional perspective in presenting an arrow-like formation of treetops pointing to a delicate three-quarter moon, which floats in blue emptiness. The vanishing point of the nearly surrealist Boulder Coast leads the eye through a canvas bisected by brooding humped shapes on one side, a roiling, white-capped sea on the other and toward a solemn gray sky in the distance. Is more abstract work in the future? "I envision breaking down my present landscape style into meaningful abstract paintings," Fox says. "I took the unused paint from a studio session last week and began an abstract painting. It somehow started leaning towards a more industrial setting. Go figure."
For now, Fox is working on a series of smaller, simpler pieces recalling the essential forms of his earliest work. "Creating a powerful place with very little encourages one to think and feel," Fox says, "and that visceral connection between a viewer and my work is what I strive for. Painting for me is a voice to relate and realize both self and the world around me."
