Cox moves between the clean look of her "White Series" like Lazy in Mid-Air, Heavy in Hand (left) and the bold colors of her mixed media works like What Is (above).

Cox believes that while artists who prefer realistic subjects get to paint what's in front of their eyes, abstract artists must struggle to "see" what's beyond theirs. "For someone who doesn't know a lot about art, what I do seems so easy because it's not realistic, and you don't have to get every detail."

What happens in her Kent Island studio has its start in Peru in 1971. Cox and her husband, whom she met in Ecuador when she was a Peace Corps volunteer, had just had their first child. Cox stayed home with the baby, but had time on her hands. "To be honest," she says, "I was bored. I mean, it was great taking care of the baby, but..."

An American friend and amateur painter named Joann Hickson, also living in Peru, encouraged her to pick up a brush and experiment. Cox tried to paint a pastoral scene. The result, she says, was "a mess."

"It took me a long while to believe I was really an artist," says Cox, who loved studying the work of such abstract painters as Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. Today, her pieces range in price from $90 for a small paper painting to $3,300 for a large oil on canvas. She has exhibited around the country; her work hangs in private collections from Massachusetts to Brazil. Locally, she has shown at Graffiti Gallery in Kensington and at Studio 24E in Linthicum. Actor Kelsey Grammer bought one of her paintings in a West Hollywood gallery.

For Cox, keeping her art simple also means working alone. "I'm pretty much a recluse," she says. "I'm not a person who can paint with other people. I don't do the group thing. I have friends who are artists and eventually we talk about art, but I do not specifically get together with a group of artists to talk about art."

Depending upon her mood or what galleries occasionally request, Cox moves steadily within the world of two-dimensional abstract flat work, often attending to several paintings at a time. She's completed series of mixed media on both canvas and paper, including an expressionistic series with some canvases as large as five-by-six feet and layered with oil paint mixed with an encaustic or beeswax medium. When the waxy substance is warmed by a heat gun and spread with a palette knife, it adds a shadowy depth. The canvases are generously splashed with reds, blues, and yellows. Her "Blue Series" also uses encaustic to give the serene paintings added texture and dimension. She's done numerous smaller or "petite" works on paper using oils and pictures clipped from magazines. A series of paintings inspired by Surrealist artist Joan Miró is populated by spirited, anorexic-like figures in what might be her most whimsical work. Several of her most recent pieces employ rectangular sections of sheet metal, painted or left bare, which add yet another dimension to her artwork.

Cox says she found personal satisfaction creating her "White Series," a collection of canvases in varying sizes that are more complicated than they first appear. To fully appreciate them, the observer must lean in and look closely. Each begins with a charcoal base undercoat, followed by layers of oil and encaustic. Cox adds colors - burnt sienna, yellow ochre, or black - and then scrapes them off after applying white. "When I was working on this series," she says, "I cut and sewed the canvases together before stretching it to give it natural ridged lines that are painted with black when completing the pieces. Even while painting them and stepping back and looking at them in process, I had moments of feeling calm."

In the tug-of-war with herself between white and other colors, Cox says she sometimes fights her prevailing instincts. "I was intentionally trying to do just colors, lots of different colors combined together, and that was going fine. And then I started putting white in and taking out the color. I like things that are real simple and clean, not a lot of extra, not a lot of junk. Even in my house, I don't like to have a lot of knicky-knacky stuff around. I like it open."