John Fox (artist)
Canadian painter (1927–2008)
John Richard Fox (July 26, 1927 – June 16, 2008) was a painter, sculptor, collagist, watercolourist and draftsman, as well as an educator who lived in Montreal most of his life. His work beginning in the late 1950s moved easily from representation to abstraction in 1972 and in 1986, back again to representation. He regarded the two different aspects to his work as having the same concerns. He was often praised as a colorist and for his rich surfaces and subtlety of effects, even in his abstract work.
As has been recognized increasingly since the 1990s, Fox’s paintings and particularly his abstractions are a valuable part of Canadian modernism.
Career
Fox was born in Montreal and educated at McGill University in Montreal (1945-1946), then, having decided to be an artist, he attended the School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), studying with Goodridge Roberts among others (1946-1949). From Roberts, he learned about colour and how it could be used to structure a painting. It was a lesson which remained with him lifelong.
After working as a teaching assistant to John Lyman at the school, he won a British Council Scholarship to study at the Slade School of Fine Arts (1952-1953), in London. In 1952 he had his first solo show at the MMFA, which was favorably reviewed.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Fox (artist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.