Walking Through the Garden

Fox painted a path prominently in the foreground running from the centre of composition leading the viewer past a rather ambiguously described building, through a light infused courtyard, and toward a pinkish coloured house with a blue door. An emerald green chair stands empty under the deep green foliage of an overhanging tree. As Sandra Paikowsky affirms below, this is simply a moment in time described with shapes, tonalities and spaces. For Fox the location is of no importance.

This is a delicately painted composition of the generation of his career described below by Sandra Paikowsky, his partner and distinguished art historian:

“Fox’s painting from the late 1950s to 1972 describes his fascination with the familiar and non-dramatic aspects of daily life. [...]it reflects Fox’s interpretation of the visual concerns of Degas, Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse. Their visual reinvention of the quiet dramas of modern life inspired Fox’s work throughout his career and would influence his lifelong definitions of art, whether his images were representational or abstract. [...]But most important to Fox was the work of James Wilson Morrice, whose quiet narratives encapsulate a moment in time without sentiment or artifice. Morrice’s sensitivity to the harmonious composing of shapes, spaces and tonalities inspired Fox’s images and his own painterly fusion of looking and transcribing what he saw and what he felt.”