Coats of Many Colors: Kent Island painter Judy Hintz Cox creates wonderfully surreal paintings

Written by Bill Thompson

Seemingly infinite streaks of multicolored paint coat artist Judy Hintz Cox's brown pullover and jeans. Her leather clogs with their ivory-tipped toes look as though they were used to kick over open cans of white paint. Cox, a lithe woman with a quick smile, says that the clothes she works in get so paint-laden that they're hard to put on. Eventually she tosses them out.

When she's not at her part-time job as a psychiatric nurse with a Glen Burnie clinic, Cox can be found at home on Kent Island, where she and her husband, Charles, moved ten years ago from Arnold, MD. By eight o'clock most mornings she's inside her backyard studio, a red, fifteen-by-twenty-foot, one-room shed, just like the ones used to store lawn mowers and garden tools. There's nothing fancy about the interior. A wooden counter and a small shelf against the wall are cluttered with art books, tubes of paint, cans of brushes, palette knives, a small radio, and, more often than not, her gray cat, Lulu. A wood easel for small paintings stands near the center of the floor. Heavy nails driven into a particle board wall are ready for larger works-in-progress.

Like many visual artists, Cox has trouble finding words to describe what drives her creative process. "I don't know where it comes from," she admits. "It just happens when I paint on a canvas. It's something inside of me."

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