Deirdre A. Fox

To speak, does an artwork have to lean more in one direction than another?

If it's ephemeral, must it be wholly ephemeral?

If the process is accumulation, must the piece be a vast accumulation, exclamation point?

If the expression is abstract, do representative elements interfere; how does the literal impinge abstract identity?

Dead center is a metaphor itself.

To the extent that there is a deskilling involved in outsourcing the execution stage of art objects from the artist to skilled craftspeople, it is different from deskilling that excuses absence of quality as irrelevant, or worse, elevates and enshrines feebleness because feebleness is a way to illustrate quality is illusory.



Did denigration of quality have to accompany or flow from isolating execution from conception? What knowledge is lost to the artist from making something with… Continue

For me, drawing and painting are intellectual exercises as much as transformative engagements of material.



Having broken out of the picture plane, I sometimes forget that one really can do what feels like infinite amount of thinking laying out an image inside the four corners (eight if you count the ground plane) of the picture box, and have endless fun and engagement watching interactions between lines, shapes, colors, complexes and seeing the depth of captured space vacillate with… Continue

I started to think tonight about what an artist feels bound by/to in creating work, what constraints an artist feels free to break, where an artist draws (intentionally or unintentionally) the line between the two, favoring bound or favoring constrained, and how that sensibility impacts the artist's work.



Artists can be constrained by material, technique, formal composition, conceptual underpinning, presentation context, media form and/or conventions, habitual aesthetics, etc., to… Continue

Meaning doesn’t have to depend on emerging from process – but I find I like the process to facilitate, underscore or otherwise impact meaning. Has anyone not played with Photoshop . . . multiplied an image or piece of an image over and over into a pattern or faceted constellation? Pumped up saturation until highlights and shadows are a day-glo facsimile of original image? Joined two images to make one image or dyptich? There’s a lot of this now. Is it still possible for the images created this… Continue