Piece of the Week: ‘Blue Eyes Fox’ by Grikis

In “Blue Eyes Fox” by Grikis, those peepers keep following me around the room. I walk back and forth in front of my screen, and those beady blue ones follow me like a new-age know-it-all “Mona Lisa.” She’s always watching.

Those stylized blue eyes are the center point of the piece. Offset by the effortless palette of greens and oranges, it’s as if “Blue Eyes Fox” walked straight out of some slightly-sinister Grimm Brothers fairytale and into your living room. Nobody’s safe when Fox has a stack of wood in her mitts.

It’s delightful how illustration can be for both young and old audiences. I can imagine this in a children’s book that you don’t mind reading to your 3 year-old 10 thousand times in a row. Illustrations such as these, where you speak to audiences of different ages are brilliantly sophisticated, because they’re working on two different levels, and letting an older (often more cynical viewer) “in on the joke” is difficult to pull off. These are rare, because there must be something we see in ourselves for this to work, and Foxy sure is anthropomorphized. Her hands are in human mittens, like an unsettling hybrid-woman-fox, dressed in your Nanna’s nighty to top it off.

The surrealist quality of this piece doesn’t end there, “Blue Eyes Fox” has become an ornament. She’s covered in decorative orange beads, with birds balancing on her like a statue, and has decorative eyebrow dots straight from a post-apocalyptic nuclear meltdown animal-hybrid commune. I think this is a gripping element of “Blue Eyes Fox,” when the static or two-dimensional aspects become vivid, resulting in imaginative neurons firing off in our brains like party poppers.

“Blue Eyes Fox” is a strong, sultry character with charming eyes and a helluva textured color palette which is why it’s our Piece of the Week, and I assume that’s okay with “Blue Eyes Fox,” but I can’t tell because she just keeps staring at me.