By Brenda Erickson
News-Chronicle
Norbert Kox would have to live well past the ripe old age of 200 if he were to paint everything he'd like.
The acclaimed New Frankin artist has dozens of folders - he counted a while back, and there were well over 100 - strewn throughout his house, each stuffed with bits of paper he pulls out of his shirt pocket whenever an idea springs to mind.
And Kox, who has long caused some stirs with his vivid apocalyptic art, is not an artist short on ideas.
"I can't keep up," he said. "The ideas keep coming to me. I can never get ahead of it."
He keeps track of his visions through a trick he learned from a University of Wisconsin-Green Bay professor back in the 1980s, which was to sketch his thoughts as they came rather than letting them evaporate by waiting until he had a spare moment to jot them down.
"I always kept paper in my pocket, and the more I did that, the more ideas would come, almost like exercise, where your muscles get stronger," said Kox.
A painter since the early 1960s, the former biker has long dedicated his work to his spiritual journey. The spiritual imagery of fire and brimstone, serpents and false idols dominate Kox's intricate work as he explores ideas, challenges tradition and takes on the ideology of mainstream religion with humor, wisdom and bold brush strokes that are his own visual parables of the apocalypse.
He hopes his work, which has earned international acclaim and has been shown in galleries and museums from New York to Australia, helps generate ideas and inspire viewers to begin their own spiritual exploration.
"The main thing is I hope that people will somehow try to think for themselves," he said. "I want to get people stirred up enough to do some questioning, and not to be led like blind sheep." His efforts have often sparked controversy, earning letters of protest on newspaper editorial pages and causing loud vocal stirs at gallery exhibitions.
"When it first started up, it was hurtful," said Kox. "I wondered how could a person so misunderstand what I was saying."
But then, in his soothing voice, Kox would explain his motives and his ideas about the imagery that makes up much of mainstream religion.
And people calmed down.
"I've been able to walk up to people and calmly start talking to them, and as I would begin to explain, all of a sudden their whole composure would change, once the interpretation was started for them," he said.
His latest project - for a show at a gallery in Washington D.C. - is a series of works based on the 1940 Warner Sallman painting "Head of Christ," a billion-selling image that has become almost universally known as the likeness of Jesus.
Sallman said it came to him in a heavenly vision, but according to Kox's research, the artist actually plagiarized the image from a 1892 work by French artist Leon Lhermitte featuring Christ at the supper table with two of his disciples. Sallman's painting is nearly an exact replica of Lhermitte's Jesus, although no credit was ever given to the French artist.
Either way, the image is a false idol in Kox's eyes, and he gloriously takes it on in the series "Picture Perfect Jesus: The Glamorous Fraud," featuring the "Head of Christ" in numerous incarnations, including one as "Sallmanstein" - "I made the top of his head flatter, and there are bolts sticking out of his neck," Kox said - and a fish head that plays on the artist's name.
The pieces - many large-scale works that are painted while flat - had their first showing at an informal exhibition in Bimini, a tropical island where Kox has spent a great deal of time since he discovered it in 1999. It is there, in the sparsely populated, sun-drenched setting, that he creates many of his works, drinking in the atmosphere for spiritual rejuvenation.
Since the "Head of Christ" image - which has sold more than 1 billion copies worldwide - graced the walls of several of the island's churches, he was a bit hesitant, but he went ahead with the show anyway.
"There was a stress level there," said the artist, who once had to calm a viewer so offended and upset he was screaming. "But as soon as I started to explain it, they caught right on." So have art critics around the world, who've praised Kox's symbolic, metaphoric work, calling him "one of America's most important visionary artists."
It's high praise, indeed, especially for an artist who's managed to have his work banned by nearly ever major religious group, but Kox isn't influenced by the opinions of others, and the art that lives inside him will continue to pour out, flooding his canvases with life. It's always been that way.
"When I started painting I was just doing surrealist painting of ideas coming out of my head," Kox said. "At that time I didn't realize there was a spiritual message for me, but when I look back on it, I see subtle communications. It was exciting to discover how that worked."
Kox's first medium of choice was oil, but a stint at UWGB introduced him to acrylics, which have a faster drying time and helped speed up the artistic process for Kox.
Now, he usually merges the two mediums, using oils for some of the more detailed part of his work.
In addition, he has dabbled in photography, has written numerous essays addressing religious issues, is working on a book, "Deceived by Jesus," which will be part memoir, part expose, and uses his auto body repair background to create welded works such as sculptures and frames that expand his paintings beyond natural borders.
Lately, he's been working with his son, Jeremy, in a business they call Raw Earth Visionaries, teaming up to create large-scale landscape sculpture including an elaborate sun dial that was on display as part of the Neville Public Museum's recent Art Annual.
"It's been a real wonderful experience for both of us," said Kox, who has no plans to let the controversies he's stirred over the years influence his work.
"There's still no compromise," he said.
For an artist, how could there be?
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