Grant Speed, who is low key, soft spoken, and reticent, talked half the afternoon with Tim Cox, who is also low key, soft spoken, and reticent; so a person wonders how they came to an agreement that Tim should attend Brigham Young University at Provo, Utah, and take the courses offered by William Whitaker, one of the West’s finest art teachers.
This did come about, and it speaks well of Grant Speed, who, after seeing only one of Tim Cox’s paintings, took time from a demanding schedule to give advice and encouragement to an almost complete stranger.
“I was impressed with Tim as a person and as an artist at our first meeting,” Grant says, “And I believed he had exactly what it took to become a good artist. Tim is painstaking with his work and is a perfectionist to the smallest detail.”
The year Tim and Suzie lived in Springville, Utah, Tim drove the eight miles to class each day. Tim went back to painting at night in order to make money to stay in school. By this time his paintings were showing at Trailside Galleries in Scottsdale, Arizona, and he managed to supply them with enough of his work to get by.
Home Ranch by Nightfall by Tim Cox appeared on the cover of this issue.Tim’s first semester at BYU was almost like having a private tutor; in the beginning there were but six students with two dropping the class early in the year and only four finishing the course. “With
classes four hours a day, five days a week, I sure didn’t have much time off,” Tim explains. “But, I had so much to learn, especially as this was my first experience sketching from live models. Up to this time the only anatomy I’d studied was that of horses and cows.”
Looking back on the first meeting with Grant Speed, it had to be a red letter day in more ways than one, because it was Grant who introduced Tim to Candice Bedner, who was associated with the Texas Art Gallery of Dallas. In 1977 Candy became Tim’s agent and has handled all his work since that date.
The Texas Art Gallery has made limited editions of seven of Tim Cox’s paintings, and signed and numbered prints sell year after year, with Last of the Herd being by far the best seller. This painting of two cowboys crowding five head of mixed Herefords through a gate was made while Tim was living on the Mallet ranch in the White Mountains between Clifton and Alpine.
The old Mallet outfit is in about as primitive an area as you’ll find in Arizona. The nearest town is 50 crooked miles away. The ranch house was old and drafty with no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no telephone, no rural mail delivery. The rocky trail leading from the highway dead-ended at their door. In spite of its drawbacks, or perhaps because of them, Tim began turning out his best work, painting as usual during the nighttime hours.
“There was just too much to do during the day,” Tim explains. “One of my chores was trying to keep an old plastic pipeline running from a spring in repair. I bet I used a million miles of innertube cut into strips trying to mend leaks,” Tim laughs. “Yet, there were things to compensate,” he admits. “Such as the days I worked with the cowboys branding and gathering cattle in that rough country.”
Tim relates some of the exciting times they had in hunting bears that had cultivated a taste for prime beef. Riding after the hounds in that rough country is not for the faint-hearted or novice rider. Mountain lions also preyed on Mallet beef, and Tim and Suzie went on several lion hunts with the owner. Ranchers in this primitive area suffer heavy losses from predators each year.
