Neal Fox

With his stained-glass renderings and large-scale ink drawings of the saints and priests of pop culture mythology, artist-illustrator Neal Fox invites viewers to worship at the altar of art and bohemianism. In his recent project Beware of the God (2011), Fox takes his grandfather John Watson (a celebrated figure of English cultural lore) and the subversive ideologues of the ’60s as his subjects—Jean Genet, Serge Gainsbourg, Hunter S. Thompson, and William S. Burroughs, among others—and surrounds them with the symbols of their personality cults. Taking the place of religious text, scrolls that float above their heads convey the iconic words and beliefs of these artists; above Burroughs, a scroll reads: “There is no line between the 'real world' and the world of myth and symbol,” a statement that might also define Fox’s artistic practice more broadly. While viewing his subjects with a profound reverence, Fox also brings to them an iconoclastic irony that points toward the contemporary cult of celebrity.