Where Our Paths Cross: The Story Behind My Red Fox Painting

I've been back in New Zealand for less than a week and I'm already covered in pastel dust.

There's a fox on my easel. Red, alert, with that particular quality foxes have of looking like they know something you don't. I'm trying to finish it before the end of the month, which means early mornings and the kind of concentration where you suddenly realise it's three o'clock and you've forgotten to eat lunch.

I need to tell you about the fox first, before I tell you about the exhibition.

The allotments

When I lived in London, there was a family of foxes in the allotments behind my house. I say "family" loosely, because foxes aren't especially family-minded creatures, but they shared the same patch of ground and tolerated each other in the way urban wildlife learns to tolerate things. Including people like me, who would stand very still at the back fence hoping not to frighten them away.

I watched them for years.

I knew which gap in the fence they used and roughly what time they'd appear. I learned that if you stay quiet long enough, a fox eventually decides you're part of the landscape and goes back to doing whatever it was doing before you arrived.

Then one evening, a cub came to find me.

Not the other way around. I wasn't hiding behind anything or waiting with my camera. I was simply sitting outside when this tiny ball of fluff appeared from beside the garage and looked straight up at me with the particular directness that fox cubs have. As though it had something important to tell me and was mildly surprised I hadn't worked it out already.

That was the moment I knew I'd paint foxes one day.

What you miss

There are no foxes in New Zealand.

That's probably good news for the birds.

But I miss them.

You don't realise how much your sense of a place is built from its wildlife until you move somewhere else and notice the absence of things you never consciously counted.

I went back to the UK this month partly to photograph. On that trip I found myself noticing things I'd always taken for granted — curlews, robins, a hummingbird hawk moth beside a busy road. I wrote about what it felt like to see Belfast's wildlife with completely new eyes.

I came home with hundreds of images, a notebook full of sketches, and the particular kind of tiredness that comes from trying to notice everything before it's time to leave again.

The fox painting comes from one of those memories of my London garden. But really, it comes from the allotments. From years of standing still and paying attention.

I think that's what reference photographs really do. They give your hand something to follow while your memory does the actual work.

Two places, one exhibition

The NZ Artists Exhibition at Cashmere Primary has always felt like a wonderfully generous event. Local artists, a community school, people wandering through on a winter evening with a glass of wine and an open mind. This will be my first time exhibiting there, and I'm really looking forward to it.

This year I'm bringing work from both worlds.

Some of the paintings are of the birds that have become part of my life here. The kotare that appears beside a stream when you least expect it. The fantail that insists on following you through the bush as though you've somehow become part of its day. The kerērū making its magnificent, heavy-winged journey through the kōwhai.

Others are of the wildlife I grew up with. The hare in a summer field. The robin in winter light. And now, the fox.

I didn't plan it that way.

It's simply where paying attention has led me.

Because when I look at these paintings together, I realise they were never really about the animals themselves.

They're about those brief moments when a wild creature lets you into its world for a few seconds. The flash of colour that catches your eye. The movement that makes you stop mid-step. The stillness afterwards, when you realise you've just been given something special, and you almost missed it.

Those quiet moments have become the thread running through everything I create. They're easy to overlook, but once you start noticing them, the world feels a little richer.

That's what I'm trying to put on a wall.

Not birds.

Not foxes.

Those moments.

And now, the fox is finished

When I first wrote this story in July, the fox was still sitting on my easel.

There was pastel dust everywhere, I was trying to get him finished in time for an exhibition, and I still wasn't entirely sure what I was going to call him.

He's finished now.

And somewhere along the way, he became Where Our Paths Cross.

I think the name came from realising that this painting isn't about one particular fox.

It's about all of them.

The foxes I watched from the back of my London garden. The cub that appeared beside the garage all those years ago. The countless evenings spent standing quietly at the fence waiting for that familiar flash of red through the allotments.

And now, years later and on the other side of the world, one of them has somehow ended up on my easel in New Zealand.

Funny how these things follow you.

The finished painting is soft pastel on Pastelmat, and I chose a solid walnut frame because I wanted something warm and natural around him. He's framed behind AR70 art glass too, which protects the pastel while keeping the reflections to a minimum.

But the thing I love most is his expression.

He looks as though you've interrupted him.

Or perhaps he's interrupted you.

And I suppose that's the whole point.

Those brief moments when our paths cross with something wild are usually over before we've properly registered them and they disappear through a hedge. 

Most of them don't become paintings.

But every now and then, one stays with me long enough that I have to put it on paper.

This one took a few years.

And if you've ever had one of those encounters with a wild animal that has stayed with you long after it disappeared, I'd love to hear about it.

Those are usually where my paintings begin.