Biography

Pioneer's Daughter

Although not itinerant like some earlier artists in search of subject matter, by contrast, Cox from his rural home near the hamlet of Gem east of Calgary does have not far to go. There is the nearby ranch site of his grandparents. His maternal grandfather L.V. Douglass as a young man worked for the legendary cowboy rancher John Ware, a freed slave from Tennessee. To the west of Calgary is the hamlet of Millarville, settled by great grandfather Malcolm Millar. Midnapore, now part of south Calgary, was named by his great great grandfather S.W. Shaw, who arrived with his family ahead of the railroad in 1883. On the paternal side, is grandparents Mary and Orville Cox’s early homestead in Twin Butte.    

So intertwined in fact is the artist with the settler heritage of southern Alberta, his own country home, a few kilometers from the Red Deer River badlands serves as a wonderful setting for old photographs, farm implements and tools of an earlier era. It’s an inspiring milieu for the artist whose studio is also a part of this rich environment.

A 1976 Visual Communications graduate of the Alberta University for the Arts (Alberta College of Art), over forty years of artistic experience now goes into a painting. Recognition for Cox’s brand of prairie realism includes his participation in nearly thirty group exhibitions and ten one-person shows. Highlights are a 1994 exhibition at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum in Looking West:  a 1999 display at Medicine Hat’s civic Esplanade Gallery and a 30-year retrospective at Calgary’s Masters Gallery in 2011. In reaction to this recognition the Calgary Herald’s eminent art critic, Nancy Tousley once stated, ‘Patrick Douglass Cox has become the limner extraordinaire of people and places in southern Alberta…’ 

Pioneer's Daughter detail

More than that, his interest in the day-to-day life of his friends and neighbours; the comings and goings of a rural existence whether in winter or summer; the animals and livestock cared for and the remnants of buildings and farm machinery past their prime speak of an artistic endeavor nowhere near completion. In a broader context, urban and rural realities still contest each other with Cox’s candid and sincere paintings reminding us of which came first and what will continue to sustain us. More recent is his focus on the often-overlooked lives of rural women. 

Over thirty years ago, not long after the artist left a successful illustration and design studio co-founded in Calgary, an egg tempera was completed titled The Pioneer’s Daughter (1986). Acquired by Alberta Foundation for the Arts for the esteemed provincial collection, this portrayal of Cox’s maternal grandmother, Elsie Dorothy Douglass, is as deeply connected to Alberta’s first 100 years as the founding of the Calgary Stampede. And certainly, more in tune with the reality of unrelenting hard work and sacrifice, the vagaries of weather and seasons and the uncertainty of any success.

Depicted from an unusual perspective where the elderly Elsie seems to be looking around one last time inside her old home, she holds in her aged, weathered hand a medal commemorating the 75th anniversary of the province. A medal received because she truly was a pioneer’s daughter. In other words, part of an essential western narrative on panel created and refined by Patrick Douglass Cox like very few have done.