Adrian Cox’s oil paintings capture scenes with his fictional Border Creatures, dwellers of the so-called “Borderlands” and hybrid creatures that blend the flora, fauna, and minerals of their environment. In two new shows, one at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco and the other at Australia’s beinArt Gallery, Cox tells new narratives within this context. Both shows run through most of June. You may remember Cox from this 2015 HiFructose.com piece on the artist.
“The Border Creatures are lovers, artists, poets, philosophers, musicians, and scientists,” the gallery says. “From the amorous relationship between Painter and Snake Gardener to the bond of scholarship between Big Dreamer and Big Thinker, this grotesque race of beings is shown to be fundamentally compassionate and earnest. Throughout these paintings, the Border Creatures overcome their seemingly monstrous forms and connect with each other and their environment through a state of perpetual wonder.”
Cox, currently living in St. Louis, is a Georgia-born artist who has exhibited across the world. His work, as of late, is marked by both an absorbing array of lush tones and intrigue and a sometimes off-putting confrontation with our own relationship to the environment.
Oil painter 
The figures in 