Fox Hysen (1982) graduated from the Yale School of Art in Painting in 2015. She is known for her direct and improvisational practice in which a painterly-imaginary emerges from an interplay of color and form. Her compositionally sophisticated pictures are loosely suggestive spaces where figures and landscapes interact and influence each other. The paintings grapple with themselves without an anchor in the observed world or photography, they are purely made up. Each painting starts with nothing and can be reworked many times. Hysen allows a picture eventually to come into focus on it’s own terms that are discovered in the process of working with oil paint. In this way the subject of her work is her own imagination, time, memories, color, shape, rhythm and artistic values.
Hysen was born in San Rafael, California and grew up in the Bay Area. She currently lives and works in Norfolk, Ct. She was formerly Full-time faculty at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA in Baltimore and is now an adjunct critic in the Yale School of Painting and Printmaking in New Haven, CT. She has had exhibitions at Ailsa, Below Grand and Soloway Galleries in New York and Gallery 16 and Et al. in San Francisco.