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At age 6 I knew that I was going to be a painter. I had my first experience with modern art at the Menil Collection at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. After years of painting pictures in New York, Washington D.C., Paris, Los Angeles, and quite a few places in between, I began to ponder how my early experiences had come to shape my art, and I wondered how they had affected other Texans who lived in and outside the state. My research into this issue is expressed through the exhibition Power Pathos. The exhibition poses the following questions: Does the vast distances, the frontier macho, the cultural isolation, the Bible belt, the Tex-Mex food, pedal guitar music, and the exhilarating sense of independence leave its stamp on myself and fellow artists in this exhibition? In other words, does the mutually shared experience of total immersion of Texas in your youth leave a lasting imprint? I would say that it does. It is the underlying premise that I used in bringing this work together, and it is something for the viewer to decide on their own. For all the artists in this exhibition, music and art is the way to fill the emptiness that we experienced somewhere between Texarkana and El Paso, Amarillo and Brownsville. The revolution we’ve felt by the consumerism of Neiman Marcus, et. al, and the physical and psychological aggression of “the land of total? football, fast food, and hard living” has been the springboard for our artwork. The search for an alternate universe to balance the inequity in this one, with its dark lives, big skies and long distances, has drawn us into other realms. On the positive side is the “take the bull by the horns” attitude, that is, the cowboy, roughneck “can do” attitude that drives us to make bigger and better works of art. more >>

Clark Fox

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