Different perspectives

Mark Fox gets much of the inspiration for his artwork from what he sees in and around Linda and Olivehurst:

"It was foggy," he says of the day he drove into the area from Sacramento four years ago and spotted a bunch of kids jumping up and down on a mattress in the street.

"There was a fire going on in a trash can next to them," he says. "I was like, 'Where am I?'"

Fox's works feature more than a hint of local humanity and hardship, and may represent the only "edge" in the sprawling Edgewater subdivision in Linda he now calls home.

"My work is low-brow," he says of the recurring, moody character he builds in his garage.

Low-brow is a far cry from the work of Vincent Wilcoxen, 50, a wood-craft visual artist living in Plumas Lake, or of Dennis Westerling, 65, a traditional landscape painter in Yuba City.

But all three — and likely, many other isolated artists in the region — moved here recently for similar reasons.

"I was able to buy a house here real cheap," says Westerling, who moved to Yuba City two years ago from Salem, Ore.

Like Wilcoxen and Fox, he has had to make big adjustments to life away from an urban or artistic hub, and to keeping tuned into a market that lies well beyond the 530 area code.

Westerling works out of a spare bedroom in his home, and he depends quite a bit on the Internet to reach his target audience.

His oil paintings — pastoral landscapes made in a style popularized in the early 20th century — sold last year during a one-man show in Sacramento for $1,100 to $4,000 apiece. But proximity is important, and it's difficult to keep his work in the eye of those who can afford it.

So he occasionally deals in old artwork.

He found a $35 painting in a thrift store in Oroville, he says, and sold it the next day for $2,000. A painting he paid $1,400 for at an auction in Chico recently fetched $20,000 from a gallery owner in Vermont. That one had been done in the familiar style of Hudson River school painters, circa 1848.

"Somewhere along the line, I developed a pretty good eye for good painting," he says.

He has a network of acquaintances in the art and antiques world elsewhere. But here, he is isolated.

"There's no connection to this," he says, gesturing to his paintings, "and nobody to talk to about it."

Fox, 36, is luckier than most. His wife, Nicole Fox, also is a painter, and the two share similar interests and artistic tastes.

But like Wilcoxen and Westerling, he sometimes feels stifled by small-town life, and isolated from like-minded folks. "The people who are attracted to this kind of stuff just aren't here," says Fox. "They're in bigger cities."

The Internet helps him too. Fox uses what amounts to a Web booth at a collective site for offbeat visual artists.

Two arts and culture magazines have featured his work, and he makes regular trips to show his paintings at Second Saturday gallery events in Sacramento and special events in San Francisco.

But he misses sharing ideas, networking and socializing within an arts-rich community, he says.

The favorable cost of living is a trade-off.

Westerling says he was clueless about what he was getting into by moving into a small town.

"There's no (artistic) community — culturally, not much going on," says Westerling.

Wilcoxen agrees. "It really doesn't exist here," he says.

Like Fox, he traded in much of his artist's life for the comfort of space.

"We could get a lot of house for the money," says Wilcoxen, who moved to Plumas Lake with his family five years ago from Los Angeles.

Wilcoxen has spent most of his career combining design and woodworking skills.

He once made what he calls "large-scale, contemporary, three-dimensional" works. The abstract works were contracted to appoint corporate boardrooms and grand residences.

He recently was hired to design and build a mock small-scale Western town for children to play in at a private preschool in San Mateo.

The project was constructed in a warehouse off Market Street in Yuba City and shipped off on a truck bed to be installed.

Like the others, Wilcoxen says he is still trying to figure out how to market his work effectively without having to spend too much time in the Bay Area or Sacramento.

But doing something else for a living is not an option, he says.

"If I'm not doing something creative," he says, "it makes me crazy."

Contact Appeal reporter Nancy Pasternack at 749-4712 or npa sternack@appealdemocrat.com