Wk 1o- Artist Conversation- Helen Werner Cox
Artist: Helen Werner Cox
Exhibition: Silent Screams
Media: Woodcarving, Oil Paint, Pastel, Water Based Materials
Gallery: CSULB School of Art, Gatov Gallery West
Website: www.HelenWernerCox.com
Helen Werner Cox is currently a graduate student here in California State Long Beach and is in the Drawing and Painting Program. She was born in Ithaca, New York and eventually moved to California for the weather. In California she worked as a high and middle school teacher and also a librarian. Her hobbies include gardening, reading and lately has been playing the DOTS game. Fiction and Mystery are her favorite genre of books.
Her gallery consist of horses, like the ones that you see in a carousel ride. She uses a wide variety of media to convey her horses like woodcarving, prints, and oil pastels. I like that her color scheme varies between each piece, some are monochromatic while others have bright and lively colors, similar to those of a carousel. Most of the horses had a terrified look on them. Her lines her subtle and it it adds a very “soft” feeling to the art, in contrast to the horse’s expressions.
Cox channels her emotions about society in her exhibit. She feels like we are going in circles and not progressing enough. While technology is advancing, our emotions aren’t. We keep repeating our mistakes so we are stuck in the same place. The horse’s expressions depict the chaos that humans are going through. She spent a long time studying carousels and even riding them which is what I think gives a realistic feeling to all of the art pieces.
I really love that meaning that Cox put in this. gallery. At first I thought she was one of those girls obsessed with horses in school but she used the horses to convey a very important message. It’s almost like a cry to society to change but no one can hear. I love her variety in the gallery and shows how skillful she is in each area.