Fox the Fox - 04-05-22

An Elaboration of a Screw-up

Fox the Fox -04-05-22 is an elaboration of a graphite pencil drawing Nude – 04-10-15 I made years ago. After my last oil painting Wag the Dog – 24-04-22 I thought I’d do another surrealist theme. See if I could do this one in one week and so I did. Sadly enough I kind of destroyed that drawing by overspraying it. At that time I was using acrylic varnish as an alternative for regular charcoal and graphite fixative. The result was that the layer sprayed on top of the drawing soon started to become yellowish. Consequently I never put it up for sale. Redoing this one kept lingering in my mind though. This oil is an attempt to shuffle shame from that uncanny spraying experiment under the carpet.

Troubles Were Bound

Even though the set-up went swift soon I found myself in trouble. You see, last Saturday 29th April I went to the Prinsenhof at Delft. A friend of mine pointed me to an ongoing exhibition of the works of Bram Bogart. He and Jan Sluijters whom I met a couple of weeks ago in Singer Laren convinced me experiment this time. Like them I would like to apply thicker patches of paint, especially in this one. This could deliver me a solution I was struggling with. The contrast in the upper part of the body is way smoother than the hairy foxy parts. A thicker coat of paint could mask this. So I thought. The result looked like a forced attempt to combine surrealism with expressionism. To me it seemed like a crossover between italian and japanese food. They only taste good on their own.

Precious Little Diamond

Through this experiment gone wrong I had a delay of a couple of days but that’s all part of the artistic process. I scratched off the thick layers and smoothen them out again. Better safe than sorry this time. Therefor I chose the same color palette as my last oil. The purple-yellow scheme gave what I was looking for. Another aspect I overcame was the struggle with depicting moonlight. Painting in thin layers didn’t gave me the possibility to vary in colors. I decided to keep the colored patches I had right from the beginning. They serve as a remnant of my initial expressionist experiment. Last but not least: The title is an hommage to a great band from the 1980s. Their song ‘Precious Little Diamond made a hugh impression on me as a teenager. By the way, the moonlight turned into a flashlight. The fox eventually is foxed.

Oil on linen (70 x 100 cm)

Artist: Corné Akkers