Tea with Miss Fox was always an awkward affair

A bit about the picture first… This is an oil painting, approx 4′ x 4′ square (must get into metric someday), painted this year and titled ‘Tea with Miss Fox was always an awkward affair’. It’s currently on display at Despard Gallery, Tasmania, as part of their Christmas exhibition. The technique is a bit different from usual: I’ve used burnt umber and titanium white only for the underpainting, then used very thin coloured glazes over the top. Quite enjoyed the change in paint application, actually, a bit of an artist’s holiday from the norm. It all started when I decided to do a joint exhibition (‘Strange Tales’) with the sculptor KRS. Now KRS’s work is dark, figurative, often melancholic, expressive and tonally low key. Mine is usually high key, figurative, and whack job funny. I guess we don’t have much in common, so deciding to do the show of her sculptures and my paintings risked the creation of a very jarring visual clash. So I started painting in dark browns and white, trying to key the whole thing down a bit, really enjoyed the stripped back nature of the thing: walking into your studio and the only tubes of paint you touch are brown and white, kind of cool for a change. And actually, not to sound parsimonious, but also a remarkably cheap way to paint given that these pigments are at the lower end of the price range.

As it was, I got to the end of the underpainting, and was so relieved to be back into colour that the glazes ended up typically OTT. Note to self: must acquire some subtlety, turning fourty next year, must begin to acquire a taste for beige and nuetrals. Currently thinking f**k that.

My daughter has a toy fox, wearing a brown velvet dress and lace petticoat, predictably named Miss Fox. As a single parent you end up doing strange things, one of which is sitting down to tea with you, your daughter and a stuffed toy fox- it’s glassy eyes peering over the edge of the table at you. Unsettling. Blend this with a love of Dickens, Great Expectations, Estella, and the whole idea of strange dinner parties (the abandoned wedding feast, left untouched for years when Mr Right didn’t show up, the plates and rotten foot covered with spider webs) and you have the genesis of the image. There was something else I was thinking of when I was painting it. As a teenager Mum encouraged me, in the global pastime of encouraging daughters to be ‘nice girls’, to visit an elderly neighbour after high school. I liked the old woman, but sitting there in her claustrophobic, furniture stuffed flat, too hot and trying desperately not to swear, made me restless and uncomfortable. I remember once when I asked to take a photograph of her, she rushed off to put on bright red lipstick. Something of this echoes in the painting I guess.