When I paint, I’m trying to arrive at a mood or a place within myself. In that sense, my practice is deeply personal. It’s not driven by abstract ideas or theories so much as by a desire to know myself more intimately.
When I was young, I often carried a sketchbook with me. I used it to explore different subjects and experiment with different ways of making pictures. In many ways, my current practice is a continuation of this early way of working. I felt a profound sense of engagement and freedom in those sketchbooks, but I was also using drawing to work through ideas about life, identity, and my own evolving value system.
My mom hoped I would become a California landscape painter, while my dad was a builder who sketched floor plans and construction ideas on napkins. My sense of color and space comes largely from painting landscapes, while my line quality and impulse to invent come from watching drawings be about an idea for something else like a place someone could inhabit. The sketchbook was also a kind of private journal, a space where I could be funny, exploratory, and honest.
Each painting starts with nothing and can be reworked many times. A picture eventually to comes into focus on it’s own terms that are discovered in the process of working with oil paint, and drawing materials. In this way the subject my work my own imagination, time, memories, color, shape, rhythm and artistic values.
Fox 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. She 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.