It’s a gift: Freeman-Fox digital art at SPSA Christmas Demo Artist meeting
December 09, 2011
By Peggy Kelly
Santa Paula News
It’s a gift just in time for the holidays when the Santa Paula Society of the Arts presents an Emmy Award-winning film editor as the Demonstration Artist of the Month.
According to SPSA President Lynda Gruber, Lois Freeman-Fox will create digital art at the Sunday, December 11 society Christmas meeting and party to be held from 2 to 4 p.m. at the historic Depot Gallery (located at the corner of 10th and East Santa Barbara streets). This meeting will feature potluck refreshments.
Gruber said Freeman-Fox “will be creating art on a notepad that will be projected to a big screen so we’ll all be able to see her creative technique.” Demonstration Artist meetings always feature a raffle, but with the high technology being used by Freeman-Fox “I don’t know how the raffle is going to go this time.” But Gruber promised there will be a giveaway.
Freeman-Fox, a resident of Fillmore, was the first in the industry to edit film digitally. She received a B.F.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. in Sculpture from UC Berkeley and studied film at N.Y.U., and has worked in many media.
Freeman-Fox began her artistic career as an environmental sculptor, exhibiting at the San Francisco Art Institute, San Jose State University and the Franklin Furnace in New York before embarking on a career as a feature film editor. While working as an editor at Disney Animation, inspired by the artists around her, she returned to Renaissance drawing and now applies the techniques of the old masters to modern digital painting.
Her landscapes are inspired by the agrarian beauty of the Santa Clara Valley and are created using a combination of photography, collage, digital paint and acrylics. Her portraits are a means of telling stories using old family photographs, painting with images as textures, brushes and backgrounds.
Freeman-Fox said she is interested in the relationship between film, photography and art. “I was an artist long before I became fascinated with film and the juxtaposition of images through film editing. I incorporated my knowledge of art and art history in my editing philosophy, and for a long time editing consumed all of my artistic energy.”
Freeman-Fox started drawing again when she worked at Disney Feature Animation on Fantasia 2000, where drawing is part of the “culture, cultivated and nourished. I felt as if I had come home.”
Literally and figuratively: she acquired a studio adjacent to her and guitarist/lutenist Stuart Fox’s Fillmore home, “without really knowing what kind of art I wanted to make; I just knew it was time. To my surprise after telling stories for so long through film, I found I had become a figurative artist. I began to study drawing seriously and soon after started painting on the computer using Corel Painter.”
Freeman-Fox paints and draws with old and new photographs, collaging images as textures, brushes and backgrounds, printing them on canvas and painting them with oils and acrylics. To Freeman-Fox, “There is an inherent fascination in using modern technology to explore the techniques of the masters. I believe in slow food and fast computers.” She teaches film editing at Brooks Institute in Ventura.
For more information on the Santa Paula Society of the Arts, visit the website www.thespsa.com or call 525-1104.