Interview with Harry Nadar, Professor of Fine Arts and Gallery Director for the Catalogue for and Exhibition at Rider University, 1995
About Sonia Fox, by Harry Nadar
Sonia Fox was born near Ulm, Germany, and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She now resides in Charlottesville, Virginia. She studied art at Chatham College, Carnegie Mellon University, New York Studio School, Skowhegan School, Hunter College (BA), and Brooklyn College (MFA). Fox has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Prince Street and Tatischeff Galleries in New York City, the Bayly Art Museum of the University of Virginia and Capricorn Gallery in Maryland.
Interview
Dear Harry,
Thanks you for your patience. Answering your questions proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Each question would elicit an answer, and then, ever truer answers.
While thinking about your questions, as to what influenced me to become an artist, I realized it was less from my exposure to art, which was slight and more from the feeling, that art of every kind carried me to a noble and beautiful world, to which I could escape, from feelings of tension, pain, and obscurity. My father had a lyric way of speaking, singing and writing, of which I was proud. My mother loved the pretty and sentimental aspects of the European Masters, which she hung in reproduction on our walls. A few things, such as these, were enough to draw me irrevocably to art, at an early age. I had not much talent for art, but I had a great love of it. As an adult, separating my use of art as an escape, from my involvement with art, as an understanding, has made art even more beautiful to me.
Why, you ask, in light of modernism do I paint representationally? Painting representationally, painting at all, for that matter, seems totally out of sync with modern life. Still, I do not know if a person has an obligation to conform to what seems to be appropriate to his time. It would be hard to prove you were right, whatever you did. All proofs, in the end, seem to come down to a matter of faith or opinion, the most obvious seeming evidence always being subject to the question of illusion. In dealing with faith I am on more comfortable ground. Faith, for me, is inspired by love, not ideas. If there is anything of which I am sure, it is that I paint as I do, because I love doing it, and because I love certain works of art. Of course it is important to differentiate love from other things, like compulsion or habit, and that is difficult to do.
As an artist, one can look around oneself, or look forward, but looking back may not always be a wrong approach. It worked very well for renaissance man.
Intellectually, I can understand a person being attracted to abstract art. Abstraction can seem to remove a person from the restraints of human life. Art itself, with its many temptations to egotism, can feel like a restraint. Still, when I think beyond the limits of our earth and our brief lives, the universe seems endlessly unrestrained and abstract. It would be such a painful loss to me, if no one spoke of our small and beautiful world in art.
I love the abstract harmonies in the sixteenth century Turkish carpets, and find them perfectly complete. Great representational painting has always shared with abstract art a strong abstract or geometric foundation. What stirs me to work most, is art in which the most deeply human is in combination with an understanding of abstract relationships, those relationships, perhaps tying man to forces outside those human.
You have asked about the influence of modernism on many aspects of my work I feel I am a person of my time, but I do not try to show it in my work. When I compose, I am simply a student of classical composition, even though I am not exactly sure of what that is. I do not think the Neoclassical and Academic artists knew what it was. If the origins of classical art are in fifth century Greek art, those principles have more in common, to me, with ancient and primitive art, than the later schools trying to mimic them.
Composition, to me, is simple to think about, but nearly impossible to do. There are influences of stasis and movement, one crying out for the other, and if one is greatly focused, a meaningful and sometimes surprising harmony can result. Stretching the boundaries of this may be a modern idea, but I often find modernism to be nothing more than ignorance. I think, it is possible to say something new, but I believe what is truly new can only be found with investigation into the self, rather than in the invention of ideas. I do not think a great deal about modernism but there are certain modern painters, like Balthus, about whom I think often.
The effect of Modernism on other aspects of my painting is not greatly conscious. My color is basically expressive. I say this with difficulty, as I spent many years fervently analyzing naturalistic color. Chardin, who I most earnestly admire, in his famous quote relating to his use of color quipped that he painted not with colors but with feelings. You can look back as far as the cave paintings of Spain and France to see a delight in brushwork simultaneous to the revelation of form, and an elegance in the suppression of evidence, in the depiction of form, which seems universal. Think of the smoothly modulated Cycladic figures in contrast to the cave paintings.
I do not try to reveal my brushwork, but I enjoy revealing it, and find I can enrich an image. Still, I love the refinement of Holbein. I find, one of the great miracles of art, is the depth of understanding of form, expression and composition beneath the perfect refinement without great understanding shallow and empty. Perhaps, I feel I have much to still learn, before I would feel the impulse to do painting in which the brushwork would not be evident.
You asked me how it was that I arranged a still life. I would collect enormous quantities of things from which I would select a few. They would express some simple theme from religious or philosophical reading or thinking. My main focus, however, when painting, was on the color, form, and feeling relationships. Sometimes, the theme seemed like the worst part of the painting, but I could not do without it. I wanted so much to be doing figure paintings on those themes, but it has taken many years of trials, for me to begin to find a way to approach working with the figure.
My still life composition was always done with a great deal of agitation. I resented the time I spent without a brush in my hand. More truly, I think composition was so difficult for me, I could take no pleasure in it. With my husband's help, and the example of his work, that has changed.
Of all of the questions you asked, your question as to which artists influenced me most, has been the most difficult to answer. I have loved art so much in my life, art of every kind, and have been so moved but it to work, that it has been difficult for me to focus on those artists who have had the greatest effect on me. I'm afraid I will be highly selective and somewhat random.
I returned from my first trip to Europe in 1971 with two lasting loves, one for great sculpture and one for early Renaissance painting. There is a balance I suppose. of naturalism and geometry in art that culture has called ideal. We see that, in the sculpture of fifth century Greece and in Renaissance art. The deviations from that can be called primitive or mannerist, the first struggling to achieve the ideal, the second fretting at its bonds. The mannerist and the primitive actually have much in common I suppose I identified with the efforts of the early Italian Renaissance artists. I loved both the grace of Donatello and his strange, awkward expressiveness. I loved the monumentality of Massaccio and his clumsiness.
When I returned to New York, I visited the sculpture rooms of the Metropolitan Museum, and discovered the medieval sculpture of India, Southeast Asia, and the Far East. I saw, in the great examples of this sculpture, a fusion of the influence of Alexander's conquests in India, conscious or unconscious, on the part of the artists, with the earthy and penetrating spirituality of those lands. Greek art has influenced the art of many geographic areas from the Far East to Africa, and it's influence underlines much of modern art, knowingly or unknowingly. I feel, classical Greek art was accomplishment in the name of man, towards which the ancients worked. When it is copied as a dogma, it's influence is deadening, but it can be an inspiring force. Even the scraps of evidence for, the now lost Greek painting, has been an important inspiration for me.
I still look at the same Giorgione paintings with the same urgency as I did twenty-five years ago. The example of his paintings without religious or narrative content, have been especially useful to me. In the last few years I have looked a great deal at Mantegna. I love the sense of mind in his paintings, and his extended structural and spiritual expression. I love the grave Bellini of the Peta's, as well as the sweet, sunny quality in some of his other works. One of my earliest and longest lasting influences are the portraits of Degas, with their beautiful compositions and profound expressions.
Two artists, with whom I studied in New York, have had a strong influence on me. I heard of Alfred Russell from a friend, at a period in which I was particularly lost. I completed nearly a years work in a semester so that I could enter graduate school at Brooklyn College, where he taught. He understood art from a wide historical, mathematical, and philosophical perspective, but he still presented art as an inspired force. His work was noble and deeply felt. Lennart Anderson joined the faculty at Brooklyn College a semester later. I was deeply touched by his sincerely felt love of visual relationships and his sense of truthfulness.
The artist to whom I owe the most to is my husband, the sculptor, Steven Strumlauf. I find his beautiful work, a persistent seriousness, a deep understanding of composition, and a wide range of expression from which I learn continually. The example of his disinterestness, which makes possible both his great rigor and his great freedom, has been a gift to me.
The question of which artists have most influenced me, has been a hard question for me to stop answering. I see art as what gives significance to science and to religious writing, as well as to literature and music. Art, for me, is the expression of consciousness, not the manufacture of objects and ideas. Consciousness, as the substance of art, ties art, for me, to the rest of my life, especially my life as a wife and mother.
My two boys have given great urgency to the important issues of my life, but I do not think that having children is a formula for self-awareness. Whatever one does, by instinct or compulsion, can be a source of awareness. It is that awareness that informs and gives significance to every activity. Much of my life has been spent painting, and I have found painting to be and endlessly exacting measure of my real understanding, through the evidence left in my work.
Sonia Fox