Featured Artist Donald Fox

Artist Donald Fox presents a collection of abstracts, created in the moment, that uncover layers of past history. Visit his website to see more of his portfolio.

 

 

I have been an artist even before I knew that there was such a calling. As a child, I drew and occasionally painted without restriction, but with no real purpose or direction other than to please myself. I observed my surroundings, which included the outer world and renderings in comic books, stamps, pictures in magazines, signs, and other forms of illustration.

 

 

Images attracted me as did color and texture and visual space. I daydreamed frequently, which was an early way of exercising my imagination. In school, I often resolved problems in math and science by visualizing aspects of them. An older neighborhood kid showed me the rudiments of oil painting he had learned from a class, and that really piqued my interest. Most of my student years, I spent many hours in school and public libraries reading about drawing, painting, and art history.

 

 

Originally from North Carolina, I studied and trained as an artist at three campuses of the University of North Carolina. I have resided and worked in Texas for several decades.

 

 

I lost my closest artist friend of the past forty years just a few months ago. I had already begun a new series of work before that called Archaeology of Thought wherein I explore layers of my artistic past as one might discover treasures from an archaeological site. As I do so, I transform them through my artistic perception.

 

 

For example, I discovered that even in my representational paintings of years ago, there were gestural brushstrokes that now have become the visual writing of my abstract color poems. The brushstrokes create the compositional structure or are the focus of the composition itself. Loss of my friend has sharpened this perusal of my artistic evolution.

 

 

Some spiritual traditions emphasize being in the moment. I believe that past and present are irrevocably connected and, together, inform the future. Personal past (that we learn from or don’t) is what gets us to the present. My past is part of every one of my artistic expressions.

 

 

In my previous Windows and Doors series, I explored planar space within that metaphorical framework. In many of those paintings, gestural strokes are subservient to color and shape. Over time, the layering of color became support for gestural expression, and playful images began to emerge and suggest a range of metaphorical whimsy. I still think of painting as either a doorway or window into an alternate reality, but the metaphor has shifted to include a pathway to experience past, present, and future as a continuum that reaches forward and backward in time and space.

 

 

My current work continues familiar themes while also exploring the evolution of visual language I have utilized for years. The colors, swirls, curvilinear lines, geometric and free form shapes that emerge in my work are like echoes from my youth, adolescence, maturity, and present.

 

 

Every painting is an excavation of the eternal moment that for me is inseparable from an ever present past, for one reflects the other. The archaeology of thought is a personal search for artistic truth.

 

Donald Fox invites you to follow on Instagram.

 

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