We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brigid Fox. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brigid below.

Brigid , appreciate you joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

COVID hit during my sophomore year of college. At this time, I was STEM major with little to no time to pursue creative endeavors, and I was more concerned with maintaining a social life than I was with painting. Like most college students during this time, I ended up moving back home after living on my own for almost two years. My growing social life dissipated as social distancing became a common practice. In turn, I had a lot more free time on my hands than I felt comfortable with (I am the type of person who always has to be working on something). This resulted in me beginning to make art again for the first time since my senior year of high school. However, as quarantine procedures became more lax, and people began to see each other again, I still managed to always stay at home. I was scared of the outside world and the people in it, and greatly preferred staying with my cats to paint rather than attend social gatherings. Shortly after finishing my STEM degree and starting my first adult job, a friend of mine encouraged me to try out community markets as a way to meet other artists in my area (for context, I moved to an area of North Dallas I had never been before). Before this, the last time I had been to an art fair was the Aransas Pass Shrimporee as a kid, and I had little to no experience with the community. Little did I know that my first market at a small coffee shop in Dallas would lead to me building a business and following. While running a small business is far from easy, it has been a divine blessing in several ways. Sharing my art has helped me get over my agoraphobia, introduced me to new friends, and helped me develop a since of pride in my work. For a while there, selling my art was the only outlet I had to help me cope with my stressful job. While I know I’m far from being self sufficient from my business alone, it is my ultimate dream to use my art to support myself. In my first year of owning my art business, I have developed life long connections, developed collectors of my work, and even hosted my first gallery as a curator at The Eclectika. While I have attended dozens of galleries and markets at this point (with quite a few notable flops of events in those numbers), the feeling I get when someone is genuinely interested in my crafts and passions is still something that leaves me awestruck anytime it happens.

Brigid , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I got into my industry through the encouragement of others. My current partner and a dear friend encouraged me to start doing art markets as a way to fight my agoraphobic tendencies and to help me develop a community. At the time of my first artisan market, I only had a few paintings (all of which I’m embarrassed of now), and a few photos of my paintings from Walgreens that I was selling as prints. I had so little money to invest into a vendor setup at the time. From here, I have taught myself how to be a stronger artist and have grown my menagerie of wares (see there’s a little bit of wordplay here because I sell a lot of animal art as well as a wide range of items I make now!)

After a long struggle with finding decent suppliers, I now sell prints and stickers in addition to originals. I also make custom cluttercore frames and hand painted totes! The totes are some of my favorite items to make- the whole concept is you get an original piece of art to carry around with you! You get to feel like a walking gallery.

As I’ve pursued different opportunities, I feel like the biggest thing that sets me a part from others is my opinions on what I consider fine art! I had the opportunity to host a gallery I curated. For my participating artists, I mainly tried to recruit small business artists like myself! For many of them, it was there first time they had been in a public showing. For me, it’s important that career artists, like street or tattoo artists, have as much representation as people who had the opportunity to pursue art education and formal training. Both facets of the creative world are equally skilled, and deserve equal representation in gallery spaces!

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

So a few times I’ve gotten the comment that I must be on drugs when people look at for the first time (for context, a lot of my work has surrealist basings). I understand a lot of my pieces can be zany, but they don’t come from a substance-induced place. My biggest suggestion for non-creatives is to approach art with a whimsical mindset- think of your favorite children’s book as a kid or the wildest dream you’ve had while sleeping. Creativity comes from wonderment more often than it does drugs. Even if something seems absolutely wild, appreciate that someone thought of the idea in the first place!

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

In talking about how society can support artists and creatives, I’m going to bring up an absolutely controversial topic: artificial intelligence… AI NEEDS TO BE REGULATED, WE NEED TO HAVE MORE RULES IN PLACE FOR AI. The human mind and soul are absolutely wonderful places, and we need to protect their creative expressions by limiting AI. Using AI art limits the experience of physically creating, and it will continue to limit the usefulness of other jobs past art- I don’t think we recognize this widely enough as a society.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/angrypaintedfox?igsh=MWg5OWQyc3d6ZGxxbA%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
• Other: Cara: https://cara.app/angrypaintedfox

  ( my website and my patreon are currently under construction! It will become available through my instagram this next month!)

Image Credits

The characters in the Studio Ghibli tote bag image (Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro) are the intellectual property of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Gibli. These pieces are only fanart.