Silhouette Studies Still Popular

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31542, 2 December 1967, Page 2

Silhouette Studies Still Popular

"The Press" Special Strvic*

AUCKLAND. When Miss Elliot Fox, formerlyof Auckland, left New Zealand in the late 1920 s for the United States, she little thought that the country would be her home for the next 50 years.

Miss Fox first went to the United States on an arts scholarship which at that time sponsored clergymen’s daughters overseas. She studied at San Francisco Schoolof Fine Arts with a New Zealand teacher, Mr Spencer Macky. Later, in Chicago, she worked for 10 years on illustrations for children’s books and magazines and it was during the depression years that she first became interested in silhouette studies.

Most of Miss Fox’s subjects in her silhouettes are children between the age of three and 11 years. “Usually I ask the mothers to tell their children a story or engross them in some kind of conversation. It’s no use trying to take them in front of television—they just become part of that little box,” she said.

“Little girls love having their picture taken and can’t wait to see it finished, but little boys are a different matter. When their picture is finished they usually leap up and rush out of the room, not the slighest bit interested.”

Miss Fox has done portraits of many children and recalls one 10-year-old sitting rather impatiently for his silhouette saying: “How long do I have to sit here like Whistler’s Mother?”

During her early years in the United States Miss Fox

recalls spending one summer touring Europe with an American family and working as governess to their son. When she returned, Miss Fox went to New York where she lived and worked in Greenwich Village. “In those days the artists who lived there were real artists and were only interested in getting on with their work,” she said.

Arriving in Wellington recently, Miss Fox describes an incident which really made her feel as, though she was home again, “I travelled out. here on a freighter with 10 other passengers, but after leaving Sydney there were only two of us. In Wellington I shared a taxi with the remaining passenger who was on her way out to the airport. Unfortunately when I arrived at my hotel I left the silhouette paper in the taxi and was worried that I would not be able to get the same material here in New Zealand.

’ “The next day I was in the train waiting to leave for Auckland when up came the taxi driver carrying these two great rolls of paper. I learnt later that he had been all the way out to the airport and back to the ship, where he was told to find me at the station. ...

“Now I know I am back home,” said Miss Fox. “That wouldn’t happen anywhere else in the world but in New Zealand.”