Fox (and Sammy's Beach) in the City

     If you look up Sammy’s Beach on the Internet, you are given maps, a lot of real estate listings, and a few photographs of a bay beach, typically with a lot of tire ruts. On Instagram it’s different, more arty shots of wind blown waves on a rocky shore, abstract amalgamations of jingle shells and seaweed, dramatic sunsets, and the like.

    These are useful ways into Connie Fox’s series of paintings inspired by the beach up in the far northern reaches of Springs that leads to the cut of Three Mile Harbor into Gardiner’s Bay. It helps to have a two-dimensional filter to begin the process of understanding the source of the abstraction.  While Ms. Fox’s paintings are products of her imagination, they are inspired by those environs and the further one gets away from the actual physical experience of being there, the more tangible the paintings become as postcards of sense memory.

     Ms. Fox, who has been a regular visitor to the site over three decades of residence in East Hampton, has mined it not just in the painterly series of abstractions that are the primary focus of Danese/Corey Gallery’s solo show in Chelsea, but in another, just as engaging if not more so, series of drawings. These layered and dense examinations on paper using white, gray, and black and charcoal, ink, and acrylic are busy and complicated in a stark, yet soothing way.

     The exhibition will remain on view through April 19. A longer review will appear in the April 17 issue.