The illustrator finds beauty and humour in everyday life, with an aim to elicit some feelings from the narratives created in her work.
“I do unfortunately have to say ‘all over’, as awful as that is,” says Charlotte Fox when asked the question of where she finds her inspiration. And her reply is perhaps more honest than most. Her sources are scattered and come from staging and colour lifted from films, the pull of voyeurism and narrative, stacks of vintage Playboy magazines and – more unexpectedly – the deadpan product photography people post when reselling things online.
“There are so many bizarre pictures where they have no intention of creating an image other than to document something for sale, but they are so weird and beautiful, and I find them very intriguing.” Mostly, though, it’s other painters who send her back to the studio with a creative spark ignited. “Nothing makes me want to paint more than seeing a great painting. It’s more of awe and excitement that something I’ve never thought of could exist so perfectly and so new.”
Charlotte hails from Brooklyn, where she lives and works, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago for her BFA. Her studio doubles as her home, which she admits blurs the line between the two in ways that aren’t always healthy. “I never really leave the space and get to paint any time, which is great but can bleed into the ‘living’ part.” She’s particularly drawn to projects with women-run galleries: “The projects where I’ve been able to work with women and women-owned galleries have been such an amazing experience of support and connection through a real belief in the work. I would love to keep working with more women-run spaces.”
When she’s cracking on with a piece, her process tends to start slow – chipping at one painting at a time, spending weeks or longer before she even picks up a brush. She will sift through saved image folders and old magazines and collage fragments together in Photoshop until the reference “feels right”. From there she draws an outline and spends the rest of her time on rendering – thinking the image through fully before capturing it physically. “At the end I will usually change my mind about a few things or decide if it’s working or not and that’s when it gets scary.”
In Quiet Frenzy, which was Charlotte’s centrepiece of a recent show titled Unravel – which took place at 303 Gallery – the piece began with a large spread from a vintage Playboy magazine. Charlotte distorted, flipped and cropped the print material until a single flattened figure came forward out of a haze of green and fluorescent yellow. “I wanted to take an image that was so fleshy and in your face and make a softer, beautiful image,” she says.
Meanwhile, Surrender / Something like Drowning came together in a somewhat different way. What began as a busy, colourful painting of two figures soon ended up being completely painted out and softened until only a loose, washy figure of an older woman remained, sprawled across two canvases, “floating and not fully there”. The one fragment Charlotte kept from the original composition was a stray porcelain baby’s head in the corner. “I loved how perfectly wrong it felt there, like a memory popping in and disturbing the painting.”
When it comes to interpreting her work, there’s no particular message running as an undercurrent through it all. Rather, she prefers to let people develop their own reading. “I like hearing what other people come up with or what they interpret through the paintings, how they piece together glimpses of narrative,” she says. “That being said, I hope they find beauty and a bit of humour, and would maybe like to sit with them for a bit and take more than a moment to connect with some feeling there.”
“Throughout my work, I’ve been interested in exploring desire, repulsion, connection and fantasy. I like to think of my paintings as what’s in between those states and communicate that tension.”
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