A teenager called this artwork “The vibing fox’ and it’s artist Ty Meier’s most popular artwork. He quips “At art markets, I hear people rummaging through the artworks in the bin; I hear shuffle shuffle shuffle awwwww and I know they got to the fox”. It radiates contentment and happiness.
The Happy Fox was a happy accident since it started as a pen and ink drawing like any of Ty’s other artworks but he fixed a mistake with gouache paint, then he fixed it so much that it became a gouache painting, which is perfectly legitimate but also much different then the rest of his portfolio. Ty is bemused that his second most popular artwork is “Ravens visit a king” a dark memento mori musing on mortality. He looks at the Happy Fox and the Ravens next to each other and wonders “What am I supposed to extrapolate from this?”
In Ty’s mind the Happy Fox is the laughing Buddha, Hotei, a fat, laughing 10th-century Chinese monk who became a symbol of happiness, abundance, and good fortune. This artwork is the easiest to like, and the least challenging to appreciate, that Ty has.
Ty is aware that if he just painted cute happy critters he’d be a more popular artist and he sometimes indulges, but his artist statement says we must contemplate darkness in order to deeply appreciate beauty so he doesn’t.
He mounted this print to a hand painted 8”x10” board, brushed on some glossy pigmentless heavy body acrylic to give it depth and texture, then lacquered it.
