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USAir Magazine, July 1993
Culling Cranberries And Catching Fireflies
Marie Fox’s contemporary folk art tells gentle stories about New England’s simpler past.
By Hatsy Shields
 Marie Fox paints happy people. They have work to do, games to play. In her contemporary folk paintings, the Boston artist catches one sweet, elusive moment after another of cheerful New Englanders enjoying life - family members in sync with each other and their surroundings in an era long gone. This is feel-good art at its most contagious - but hardly naive.
In an 1800s scene of rolling hills anchored by a rambling farmhouse, a farmer hoes rich, dark garden soil while his yellow-aproned wife carries fresh eggs from the hen house. The grandmother knits in a rocking chair in a front yard flooded with sunshine. A small boy pedaling a bicycle pulls his little brother in a red wagon. Every tree in the orchard is an open, pink umbrella of apple blossoms. Colors are vivid, and harmony rules. Fox’s paintings make us want to believe it happened just like that.
Intense, observant, and exacting, Fox realizes she’s romanticizing the past. “In each painting,” says Fox, “I select a moment out of my memories and, with my imagination and paintbrush, try to create a world that is simple and beautiful, centered around family... a place where work and perseverance are rewarded, love and neighborliness commonplace.”
Pressed to answer why young couples always look moonstruck, why no storms threaten, and no roofs are swaybacked, Fox admits that by creating a perfect world she’s probably answering personal longings. “I guess I’m creating my own history,” she says. “Maybe this desire to communicate to viewers is a substitute for not being married and having children myself. When I create a painting that’s about my mother’s childhood on her family’s farm, for instance, I feel a sense of connection and continuity even though I barely remember being there. I’m telling a story, passing it on.”
The pull to tell the stories of her heritage took hold one spring seven years ago when she visited her mother and two sisters in Duxbury, Massachusetts, the seaside town where she’d grown up in an old ship-captain’s house facing the bay. At the time, Fox had been working as an art restorer at the Balboa Art Conservation Center in San Diego for 10 years.
“It’s difficult to know why people go back to the places they came from,” she says. “I think I came home because I needed to be near family and to be surrounded by the intimate spaces of New England again. And I missed the seasons.
“I’d just turned 40 and had been living in the unrelenting sun of modern Southern California. During my visit East I felt bombarded by familiar surroundings. I’d wander by the old buildings of Boston and drive through the nearby countryside, and see it all with new eyes.”
Just a stroll in Boston’s Public Garden grounded her in her family’s past - the main path is named after her grandfather Theodore Haffenreffer, a prominent New England brewer. In Duxbury, clouds of lilacs could overwhelm her on a walk to the mailbox. Suddenly she realized memories were nagging to be explored. She yearned to graft onto old roots. Goodbye, California - Fox was on her way home to paint full time.
In a third-floor studio on Charles Street at the foot of Boston’s Beacon Hill, she began to work on small paintings in painstaking detail. Inspired by activities as mundane as the grocer displaying fruit on the sidewalk or a neighbor hanging out laundry on a windy day, Fox also studied old photographs and made lists of the subjects she wanted to capture. With a master’s degree from Oberlin College and training in both sculpture and architecture, Fox came to folk art equipped with a knowledge of composition, technical expertise with art materials, and sophisticated drawing skills. But it was perhaps more as a quilter - an avocation she had developed in California - that she approached her blank canvases.
“I love the challenge of piecing together patterns, colors, and shapes in fabric,” she says. “I paint with acrylics, a flat, opaque paint that seems appropriate for the little patches of bright color, quilt pieces actually, making up my folk paintings.”
Depending on the size and complexity, a painting might take Fox as long as five months or as little as three weeks to complete. She admits to sometimes spending 12 hours a day at her easel. Over the past six years she’s painted between 30 and 40 canvases, fetching prices ranging from $1,200 to $9,000.
Fox never picks up her paintbrush hoping for divine inspiration. The story may come from the heart, but the structure, design, and colors are the result of calculated problem solving.
“I spend a lot of time planning a painting,” says Fox, whose painting of the national Christmas tree was commissioned by the White House and whose commemorative print of historic Boston has sold in the thousands across the country. “First I do a pencil drawing of the basic structure. The design is as important to the story as the use of color and the rhythm within the painting. I’ll use curves to pull you in and move you around. I’ll change perspectives within the painting to unsettle you. I want you to shift feet and see from different viewpoints.”
Robin Parrella, owner of the Newbury Fine Arts Gallery in Boston and in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, thinks it’s Fox’s extensive training that sets her paintings apart from other folk art. “Marie’s figures are well-defined, meticulous,” she says. “There’s a child-like quality to the themes, but she’s clearly a schooled artist.”
A critic once proclaimed that art must take reality by surprise. Fox has graciously allowed reality to change into clean clothes and knock the mud from its boots. She is an artist who politely insists on offering her viewers a thoroughly pleasing reality, one wrapped in smiles, drenched in fresh sea air, and alive with children’s voices.
Hatsy Shields writes about design for the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Christian Science Monitor, House & Garden and Horticulture Magazine.
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