I went to a small alternative school for 7th-9th grade which allowed me to meet other misfits and weirdo art kids which was a breath of fresh air. Creatively speaking, I thrived although the school wasn’t great academically, except for its pronounced focus on world history and religions. I could often be found shooting pictures with my SLR, developing them in the darkroom, reading the Iliad, learning HTML and primitive web design, lurking some obscure BBS, or inking an elaborate graphic novel with a long skinny brush, spilling ink all over the place and on my always muddy clothes. I was never without at least a few animal skulls and a bottle of India ink in my filthy field coat. Life was a Kafkaesque horror show at home, but I spent all of my free time exploring the woods and pastures around my home looking for signs of wildlife. Deer, foxes, rabbits (I had a pet orphan cottontail), beavers, porcupines, lynx, weasels.. the occasional moose, endless birds. It was all amazing to me, and I wanted to grow up to be like Gerald Durrell, always surrounded by animals.
There is so much more I could write about my early childhood, but at the risk of my grotesque recollections coming across as petty bitterness I will leave it at that for now. All of my experiences drove me to become a hardened person capable of surviving just about anything, but it easily could have turned out very differently if I was not imaginative and deeply determined to improve myself.
Needing more structure -and getting none at home- I then found myself shipped away to a lesser known but rather austere boarding school in New Hampshire. Here, I continued to thrive in the arts. I was a darkroom rat, and had an amazing teacher who recognized my potential and brought in life drawing models and introduced me to oil painting and digital art, as well as art history. I also enthusiastically grew my webmaster skills as the internet continued to evolve. However, it had never occurred to me that I should care about my grades outside art because there was never any motivation or positive reinforcement in my life. It was so much more fulfilling to be lost in my own projects. However, at boarding school I was finally out of that house and I wanted to keep it that way- so after some academic faltering, I finally found the motivation to pull it together and got myself into the Rhode Island School of Design.
I spent the summer before I started college working for the family newspaper in Rhode Island, composing ads in Quark, creating page layout boards with wax paste-up and reporting on local events with a camera and observing the process of editing and putting together the resulting publication. I’m thankful to have come along at a time where I was able to experience these and other antiquated, time consuming methods before they soon thereafter quietly slipped into obsolescence. I have always enjoyed tedious hands-on processes that result in a worthy outcome.
Our first day of classes at RISD was 9/11/01 and twin classmates of ours lost their mother and grandmother who were flying home from our orientation on a re-booked flight. We were painfully jolted into a new arena of life. My college experience later ended with getting in the way of Hurricane Katrina, but everything in between was like a magic bubble that hadn’t popped yet. But of course, the eventuality goes without saying.
Dressing up in imaginative, unique styles was such a huge part of the student culture at RISD. Every day was an avant-garde fashion show on Benefit st. Nothing was too weird really, and people rolled deep with their personal aesthetics. I was mixing clothing I made myself from scratch with antiques and usually altered thrift store finds from the 70’s and 80’s in a clashing mix of muddy and bold tones and textures. I had a friend who made herself colorful Nordic inspired jumpsuits on a knitting machine, others who layered 80’s aerobic wear, there were a few bag lady types, and of course, all black. It was very inspiring to be around people who so readily expressed themselves. Having spent the last few years at a boarding school with a strict dress code, I was thrilled to have this new freedom. I was on a journey of self discovery and improvement after years of barely being allowed to exist and I was hungry for all of it. We experimented with makeup, cut our own hair and presented ourselves without worrying about being accepted by society or anyone outside our ridiculous magic bubble. This new form of self expression deeply informed my creativity, and the roots of Crossfox go back to this time.
I majored in painting, focusing on oils. I painted gestural portraits and landscapes (a nod to Ashley) in the color palettes you still see me working in today. I also took a very rudimentary pattern making class, which improved my clothing construction skills. I like to say I take a painterly approach to making clothing.
I seem to be one of the few people that I talk to who doesn’t think their college experience wasn’t a waste of time or regret the debt that came with it. I received an amazing, well rounded education at truly probably the best art school in the US, but I knew that wasn’t going to be enough to “make it” as an artist. Simply going to a top school wasn’t going to charm my whole life and turn me into the next Andy Warhol, I knew that. Schools are just business after all. Although I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do, I knew it wasn’t going to be through conventional means. As my classmates mostly moved to NYC and LA with the financial and emotional backing of their families, I started shipping my possessions south and arranged to transfer within the company I worked for -full time on top of my class load- off campus to New Orleans, a more affordable city with a fascinating culture and art scene and a small colony of RISD grads from the class preceding my own.
This would prove to be a fateful decision which set off a completely unexpected series of events and taught me to NEVER count on anything until it actually happens, no matter how well planned, and maybe not even after it happens, possibly to the point of neurosis.
To be continued…
Crossfox 
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