John Richard Fox (July 26, 1927 – June 16, 2008) was a painter, sculptor, collagist, watercolourist and draftsman, as well as an educator who lived in Montreal most of his life.
[2] He was awarded the Greenshields Foundation Grant in 1955, the first given and in the same year, the National Gallery of Canada bought his work.
In the later 1960s, he began to make bronze sculpture but he had become dissatisfied with representation and from 1972 to 1986 turned to a form of Lyrical abstraction in large canvases.
During this period, he showed his work with Galerie Marlborough-Godard, Montreal (1973) and Mira Godard Gallery in Toronto (1986).
[2] Unlike the Group of Seven whose favorite subject was landscape, Fox was inspired by Modern life and particularly its quieter aspects.
It was an insight that pervaded his lifelong definition of art, whether representational or abstract and makes his work important in the map of Canadian modernism.
[1] From the late 1950s to 1972 he preferred to paint interiors, nudes and landscapes, such as he found in artists like Degas and Pierre Bonnard.
At first, his paintings had a kind of almost monochromatic palette, then they became effects of shifting shapes to which he added marks which seem spontaneous, then used collage.
[6] In 1983, he began his works using undefined marks in charcoal and proceeded to add oil paint, mapping an allusive landscape or the body.
[2][12] In 2010, the McClure Gallery, Visual Arts Centre in Montreal held an exhibition curated by Sandra Paikowsky of John Fox's paintings titled John Fox: Reconfiguration concerning the artist's return to representation in the mid-1980s after fifteen years of painting abstractions.
[20] In 2012, a show of Fox's abstract work was held at Battat Contemporary, Montreal with a major catalogue.