Article

John Richard Fox

Published Online May 22, 2008

Last Edited December 16, 2013

John Richard Fox, painter (b at Montréal 26 July 1927). Trained by Goodridge ROBERTS, Fox also worked under John LYMAN at McGill. In 1952 he entered the Slade School of Art, London, Eng, and later spent 2 years in Italy and France before finally returning to Montréal in 1957.

John Richard Fox

John Richard Fox, painter (b at Montréal 26 July 1927). Trained by Goodridge ROBERTS, Fox also worked under John LYMAN at McGill. In 1952 he entered the Slade School of Art, London, Eng, and later spent 2 years in Italy and France before finally returning to Montréal in 1957. In 1964 he completed a mural for Charlottetown's Confederation Centre. Fox was well known for his intimist figure and landscape paintings when in 1972 he began to paint large abstract works influenced more by European and American modernism than by a Québec sensibility.

Without the distraction of recognizable imagery, Fox pursued his preoccupation with figure-ground ambiguity and moved through abstract impressionism to collage-inspired symbolic abstraction. Since 1987 his work has dealt with the figure within a context that suggests a narrative. He has shown widely in Canada.