I have been immersed in art my entire life. Having started my childhood living in a haunted house, my art was a process of channeling. Besides the wonders of childhood, I had questions beyond what could be seen, heard and felt. There was something beyond the apparent that united humanity in ways we refused to address, in ways my minister father seemed hypocritical trying not to explain.

I became the kid that never stopped digging in the dirt, collecting the bugs, the bees and expressing my thoughts through pens and paints. While everyone in the house was asleep, I was up listening and making art. I started high school at a time when drugs, gangs and politics were decimating inner city Detroit. My artwork bought me a scholarship to Interlochen Arts Academy, a boarding high school in upper state Michigan. I majored in painting, drawing, ceramics, wood cut and though I was a fish out of water, an inner-city black kid among trust fund children, I learned to fit in and seem normal. Still, I had so much to say. There was so much injustice to speak out against. Why couldn't we all see, we were just hurting ourselves.

By the time I got to college at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and had absorbed my human share pain. I traded storytelling in a single frame for the flickering images of motion pictures. It was my way of dealing with the disillusionment I was developing about mankind.  It was also my way of coping with the loss of my inspiration to paint, the loss of my innocence and need to speak out. I put my brushes down and painfully could not look back.

After establishing myself in the film industry, I took a hiatus from my motion picture career at the start of the Bosnian / Kosovo conflict and served in the US Army as a Tank Commander in a forward deployed battalion. It was, my way of addressing an urge that still called at me, though I felt it futile to speak, I had to take action, I had to help mankind forward. If I could do nothing else, I could help hold the line on injustice.

After my time in the Army, I went on to obtain a master’s degree in producing from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. I thought, now I could tell the human story, with all its hopes, suffering, fears, and dreams. I founded Decipher Entertainment, a commercial, feature film and television production company. I thought I had become content in amassing over thirty feature credits as a Producer.

I was able to combine my military and film training by maneuvering crews and equipment, by train, plane, and automobile in over fifteen countries and numerous currencies throughout the world. But just like I returned to filmmaking from the military, I was ultimately driven back to painting and fine art. This time with a tireless, renewed focus and a new wealth of inspiration to express...

In my youth I saw the injustice and the pain. It took living through it for me to understand being an instrument of change. After embracing people of every walk of life, myriad religious beliefs, political positions, and human insights, am I reassured that the beauty of humanity truly lies in its spirit of diversity in all forms it takes.

I do not create from the division of mind, but the sentience of soul. It is all things, a thirst for wonder, a fear of the unknown, a need for safety, a sacrifice that enlightens, a love that inspires, and even a hate that can diminish. I have always thought of my work as a Gohonzon, a mirror into one’s human psyche.

Surrounded by machine driven perfection, and algorithms, I explore the human entity and the beauty of that imperfection. I mix the organic unpredictable current of nature in all its forms, confined, or freed, but transformed into structured constructs as juxtaposition. 2D form becomes a three-dimensional substance and in subconscious ways the viewer unpacks what these transformations mean to them. Within the human experience, transformation can be both liberating and a frightening upheaval manifested in many ways throughout our lives. Despite our comfort with either, our need for culture, music, and art, proves our desire to communicate on levels beyond what we can see, think, and feel. I believe mankind is in the process of growing and my art speaks to that.

Sincerely,

Dwjuan F. Fox