Howard's Bio

Exhibitions | Collections | Artist's Statement | View Howard's gallery

Howard Fox was born in Toronto, Canada in 1955. Between 1975 and 1979 he studied Education B.F.A.H. at York University, Toronto. He met his Israeli-born wife, Dorit, in the Far-East which brought him to Israel. He currently lives and works in Carkor, Israel.

Michael Wolman, who initially met Howard at university, and has travelled through his worlds for thirty years, wrote the following in a piece entitled ‘Impossible Cities’:

“Approaching Venice for the first time, there was astonishment in the clusters of structure, rising from the Adriatic blue into the blush of twilight pink and gold. How was this city possible? And how was it possible that it seemed, familiar? Had it been glimpsed in dreams? In the paintings of Monet and Turner? No…theirs was a literal vision, impressionistic, yet possible.

This was an impossible city. This was fiction, a story made of stone, and gold and imagination. This was the melding of east and west in the mind of many makers. This was city - as art - as fiction. Gazing upon a woman dressed only in her own skin, high upon the balcony of a canal palazzo…the recognition was swift and overpowering. The familiarity was genuine…this impossible city had been visited many times over the thirty years I had travelled through the worlds of Howard Fox.

We met at university. My first recollection: he was sketching and holding court. He was an enchanter, a storyteller, a magician. Those who were drawn to him never doubted that he was the center of his world. His imagination, a lightning rod for fables and fictions of imagery and song. He was a creator. And for thirty years…he has continued to refine his magic. His potions are stronger now. His stories more complex. His palette has absorbed everything he has ever seen and done…and now…the worlds he creates are more real, more tangible and more impossible than ever. He is the author and the world is his fiction.

For many, Fox has been seen as a realist, a hyper-realist, a magic-realistic. Why? Because his hand is superb, his technique is impeccable, and his paintings are accessible. But these labels are wrong all the same. What Fox produces is Fiction Painting. He imitates nothing and creates everything. He crafts the environment and its structures like a master architect. He places his characters precisely and intimately in dark corners of his stage…as deftly as a theatrical director. The viewer can even hear him whispering the dialogue into the ears of his performers. He colours mood and light as if behind the camera of an impossible cinema. Here is Babylon. Here is Bangkok. Here is the city of your dreams, and there, the city of your fears. And here is Hell. All fictions, yet all alive and real and possible…despite the impossibility of everything.

There is no doubt that John Ruskin would have considered Fox the greatest architect the world had ever known. Building with workman’s hands every brick, every pillar, every column, arch and piazza. Fox the Maker. Inviting only those worthy enough to people his perfect and divine stories. For his paintings are each, fantastic fables…worlds that Orientalists might sell their soul to visit…if only for a single sunset.

Italo Calvino created Invisible Cities. Howard has mastered Impossible Cities and has made them visible to us all. His fictions are our realities.

Perhaps the greatest pleasure is that Fox is both omnipotent and generous. He withholds nothing. He gives everything to his viewer. His fictions are never truncated. The whole story is in the viewer’s gaze – if they are simply willing to read his entire story word by word and colour by colour. And each painting, each fiction…is unique unto itself. Worlds may coalesce, but they will never collide…for Fox is an expert guide into the realms where he is the shaman and we are the beneficiaries of his mythologies. Fox invents the past where every future will unfold.”

Exhibitions

Gadatsy Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 1978
Gadatsy Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 1979
Gallery Shinar, Tel Aviv, Israel, 1980
Sheraton Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel, 1980
London Art Gallery, London, Canada, 1981
Michael Gilbert Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 1985
University of Judaism, Los Angeles, USA 1989
Skirball Museum, Los Angeles, USA, 1989
Koffler Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 1989
Bystriansky Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 1989
Museum of Civilization, Ottawa, Canada, 1991
McCord Museum, Montreal, Canada, 1991
New York Jewish Museum, New York, 1992
Beit Hatefutsot, Tel Aviv, 1993
Liss Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 1998
Bernard Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2006
Artist's House, Tel Aviv, 2007

Collections

McDonald’s Canada
Penholdt Holdings, Canada
Novator,
Esso Canada
Art Gallery of Ontario
Museum of Civilization
Weizman Institute of Science
Pinetree Investments
Greenwin Inc.
Beth Tzedek Synagogue, Calgary
3 Arts Entertainment, Los Angeles

 

Artist’s Statement

"All I have to do is throw seeds in every direction, and wait to see what grows.”  Said the gardener in the Garden of Eden.

Painting for me is not simply reproducing something that I have already seen, but taking the mundane and the beautiful, weaving them together to tell a story. I am painting fiction.

Like any work of fiction it is important that the plot and the moment are somehow grounded in our perceptions of reality. Mankind has showed itself off through its architecture, utilizing the public building as a canvas for creativity. Buildings and monuments have a way of placing themselves in the context of history. They, by their style, design, use of metaphors and aesthetics, historically grew out of a given culture. For the Chinese it was China, Byzantine was Byzantium. Modernism sought to start anew and wipe the slate clean, giving us the lowly box. Void of humanity and imagination, the box found nobility and has dominated the late twentieth century landscape.

I paint that which interests me. Building cities, streets, windowed rooms, people and nature, as it is, and as it could be. I choose to house my stories in a grand mix of cultures, dating over the centuries, much like many a European city. As a child, my house being the second built on the street, I spent hours watching as the builders spread cement, placing brick upon brick, the excess binder scooped and slung into a bucket. Day by day a house came into being, adding to the growth of my enveloping suburbia. After leaving Toronto for the first time to cross the big pond, I was happily overwhelmed.  In Israel I saw structures dating back hundreds and thousands of years. Rome was a museum to a vast array of come and gone cultures. The Far East, with its smells, tastes and, thick as soup, ornamentation, treated the eye to an orgy of color. But, it was Istanbul which acted as a catalyst to my style. One day, in the early eighties I found myself standing in the middle of the Aya Sophia, breathless at its grandeur, architecture and opulence. That it had gone from being the largest church in the late Middle Ages to a mosque spoke volumes. I was charmed by how out of place both I and the other tourists looked. But this was the reality. Cultures had mixed, and the characters are not always in harmony with the setting.

This is the tension of time and space. The tension of my realist style with the quixotic. A giant sleeps on a bridge, providing a dilemma, which underlines the apparition itself. The face of a dictator appears on the walls of a factory, while the humble workers turn out four legged citizenry in the name of the revolution. We peer into windows and follow the skaters across the frozen floor of a flooded building lost in time.  Tel Aviv becomes a palette, its layers of peeled paint leaving her naked to the sun.

The picture becomes a story, not always obvious, yet alive. Fiction allows me to play, to paint my thoughts, to see what happens. 

My work also serves as an escape. All the works in the show were painted during the years of the intifada. A time when reality was bizarre. A time when everything looked the same, but somehow the air, the mood and the colours had changed. Reality here was an existential highway. War was at your door, birds sang in the garden, and the sun was omnipresent. The spirits danced upon the land, laughing, their faces covered in tears. Confusion dominated my internal dialogue and manifested itself in works which do not always come to conclusions. The uniting factors in my works are the initial richness of the image, followed by a collage of ideas both political and existential. Take a walk through my paintings and enjoy.

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