Ben Fox was born and raised on Vancouver Island and has been painting and making art his entire life. He is currently a foreman with a Victoria construction company and brings this skill into his custom Hemlock frames.
Ben studied filmmaking at the Vancouver Film School in 1999, and then worked for several years on film productions in Toronto, as well as documentaries filmed in Mozambique and the Central coast of BC. Filmmaking sparked a serious interest in Documentary photography, which has guided and informed his art practice – eventually leading to the paintings which he creates today.
The work is inspired by the wild and expansive British Columbia locations that Ben has spent extensive periods immersed in – sketching, painting and making photographs. He has lived in a remote cabin in Haida Gwaii and spent months of his life on sailboats exploring the Great Bear Rainforest, creating art and gathering material for future work.
“The beach scenes portrayed in the Imaginary Beach series are imagined, but they likely could exist in one of the endless remote pockets along this coast and therefore feel familiar. As an artist, I’ve sought out remote, wild environments as inspiration for paintings – spending vast amounts of time on Haida Gwaii and exploring the Great Bear Rainforest on sailboats as an example. Recently, I’ve allowed myself the license and freedom to take the building blocks of these spaces that I know intimately – trees, logs, rocks, the ocean – and create my own unique places on canvas that I would love to spend a day exploring if they existed. Hopefully, some of them do.”