Blog
Posted on 3/10/2010
By Donald Fox
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My first solo exhibit occurred in 1969 in a bank lobby in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I had completed a year of teaching 9th grade social studies in Winston-Salem and used painting as a deliberate form of therapy. My frazzled mind needed something to bring me back to some semblance of normalcy. Civil rights issues had created unrest throughout the country, and that, combined with escalations in Viet Nam, made a politically tinged campus like UNC more charged than the average community. Even Winston had felt reverberations of racial strife – neighboring Greensboro, remember, had been the sight of one of the first sit-ins. Several evenings had seen National Guard troops patrolling Winston’s streets, but fortunately no violence ensued. On Chapel Hill’s Franklin Street, the main drag through town, peace vigils were daily fare at noon. A growing line of Quakers, townspeople, and students stood silently for an hour in protest of the war. With no apparent cue, the group would disperse and go about personal business, or small groups, twos and threes, might linger over coffee for avid discussions.
Against this backdrop, I put together my show of a dozen or so watercolors. I had created a series of colorful and playful images based on crowd scenes from the previous year’s state fair in Raleigh. The original pencil drawings I accented with loose pen and ink strokes and then applied touches of bright watercolor. For some years now I have not been able to find any of the remaining pieces; only two were sold from the exhibit. Still, as my first outing as a professional artist, I felt satisfied with the outcome.
Looking back, I’m a bit surprised at that group of paintings for their carefree social statement – surprised mainly because of the social upheaval during those years of the mid to late sixties and early seventies. I was actively engaged in some of that unrest and was politically active as well. Social issues were very important to me and were partly responsible for my decision to teach. As a young twenty something, though, I had not yet discovered my path of artistic expression. Art existed in a separate realm for me. Many artists tackled those socio-political issues head on in their work, but I only did that in poems and actions. Visual art was a refuge, a separate and sacred space. In many ways art has remained that for me, but as my understanding has evolved, the complexity of the relationship between art and society has deepened for me.
