Foxes

Joe Liles, standing next to the cupola on top of Watts Hall.

Foxes

1978

This was the fifth and last print that I produced at the Boulevard Farm. The first spring I spent on the farm gave me a blessing. In my rustic front yard, near the well, there was a concrete culvert where a mama red fox gave birth to three pups or kits. This fox family accepted me as a non-threatening co-habitator of the farm and actually posed for my photograph. I turned the photo into a pen-and-ink drawing, and then turned the drawing into a stencil for screen printing. Most screenprints are usually of large fields of color and few details. In these first prints produced in my basement I tried to push the medium to capture the fine details of the lines, dots, and squiggles in my pen-and-ink drawings.