On a bright summer afternoon, watercolor painter Lindsey Fox walks along the dirt trail toward Dry Creek Falls. The four-mile loop snakes through a small part of Oregon’s central gorge and ends at a large natural amphitheater punctuated by a large waterfall.
“There’s a lot of mental health benefits for me there. And also, I just love being outside,” she said.
But she doesn’t just admire the sounds of the trees or the crunch of the leaves beneath her shoes. She’s also paying attention to the subtle and unique patterns in nature surrounding her.
“What inspires me are rocks, mountains, craggy peaks, usually a little bit of snow, some alpine lakes, vegetation, basically just anything that includes a pattern,” she said.
Along with her usual hiking gear, Fox straps a large rolled-up piece of paper to her backpack, a small bottle of water, and a bag of different size brushes and watercolor palettes.
Finally, when she reaches the large waterfall, a torrent of gushing water spewing from the top of a tall and craggy basalt cliff, she sits for a moment, pulls out her watercolors and starts to paint.
Watercolor artist Lindsey Fox puts finishing touches on her large-scale painting of the craggy rocks from Dry Creek Falls
Steven Tonthat / OPB
Fox takes those inspirations and translates them into elaborate pieces of art that invite audiences to appreciate nature and its unique patterns.
“It’s never like the exact same thing twice. And I kind of feel that the way that I work with watercolor mimics that.”
But Fox isn’t merely painting the landscape. Instead, she’s more interested in focusing on certain elements that she finds most appealing.
“If you paint an entire landscape often, you’ll see that vista. You won’t necessarily see the rock that I’m most intrigued by or the light or the color relationship. So abstraction is a way for me to really focus on those color relationships, those pattern relationships, and those compositional elements that I want to include,” she said.
Because she’s the one deciding which elements to put into her paintings, Fox said that abstraction offers unique challenges regarding what to paint.
“Abstraction is so much harder than just representing something because you’re taking all of these different elements, and you’re deciding what happens. You’re not following a script, you’re not looking at something and seeing whether it looks like what it’s supposed to. You’re just creating a composition out of nothing,” she said.
Because watercolors are so unpredictable, Fox learned to embrace those happy accidents that make her art so unique.
“The accidents are what make it fun and what makes deciding on the fly and deciding what to keep and what to rework is kind of what allows the paintings to evolve,” she said.
Watercolor artist Lindsey Fox sits in front of her finished paintings at Portland's Art in the Pearl.
Alan Zhou / OPB
Fox credits her love of art to her two parents, Larry Fox and Martha Eldredge. Fox grew up in northern Michigan and said that being around her artist parents fostered her creativity as well as her love of everything outdoors.
“My dad is a sculptor, and he works with wood and then paints surfaces very inspired by architecture, urban landscape, but then also natural kind of colorways … and then my mom is a painter, but she also has done fiber work, jewelry. She has so many things that she’s good at. It’s kind of mind blowing,” Fox said.
Fox moved to Portland in 2014 after graduating from college to find work as an artist and to explore Oregon’s natural beauty.
“I love being able to go to the coast in two hours or go to the mountains in two hours or go to the desert. There’s just so much more variety, and it’s so inspiring,”
In 2015, Fox began working for Nike, but she eventually realized where her heart truly belonged.
“There was a point where I was starting to not be able to pursue creative projects in my own work, and so I started to feel like in order to push myself with my own work, I needed to let that other full-time job go,” she said.
In 2021, Fox moved into a larger studio in Northwest Portland at Northwest Marine Art Works, a massive building housing dozens of studios for artists, and has remained at that studio ever since.
The decision to leave the safety of her job at Nike to pursue art full-time wasn’t one she took lightly.
“It’s always interesting working for yourself. There are a lot of anxieties that come with that, whether it be financial or just balancing time or friendships or things like that,” she said. “I grew up with two artists as parents, and so it’s terrifying doing your own thing.”
Nevertheless, she continued to bet on herself, and devoted more time to creating art that fulfilled her creativity.
One such project came to fruition in 2016 when Fox, along with her partner David Faling, decided to hike the entire Pacific Crest Trail.
The five month long journey took them thousands of miles from the bottom of California to the top of Oregon. Along the way, Fox stopped at various locations and painted the scenery.
“I would paint and it wasn’t necessarily about painting the most iconic thing on the trail. There were lots of things that every hiker will remember. It was about finding those landscapes or those moments that really inspired me,” she said.
The trip was arduous, said Fox, but the experience produced 28 paintings that she considers some of her proudest work.
“This is definitely a project that started a lot of the work that I’ve done, but it’s still something that I’ve kind of moved on from stylistically. I really appreciated this project, and it really jump started this kind of painting.”
When she’s not painting or hiking, Fox travels across the country, showcasing her work at local arts fairs and teaching the occasional watercolor painting class. She’s shown her art at Cherry Creek Arts Festival in Denver, and Art in the High Desert in Bend. For her, the best part of working the arts fairs is interacting with potential customers.
“You really get to see how excited they are about it. Sometimes I forget that I’m excited about a painting, and then someone will be looking at it for a really long time and I’ll be like, what intrigues you about that? You get way more of a direct response from in-person events, which is what I like,” she said.
Locally, Fox shows her art at Portland’s annual Art in the Pearl, a weekend-long festival where local artists can set up booths and sell their work to an admiring public.
In 2024, Fox showcased her work with her father, a special moment for the two of them.
“It’s fantastic to see your kid flourish in this market. It’s very rewarding,” Larry Fox said.
Watercolor artist Lindsey Fox stands with her father, Larry Fox, in front of her paintings showcased at Portland's Art in the Pearl Arts Festival.
Alan Zhou / OPB
Ultimately, whether it’s hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, or simply enjoying artwork in a gallery, Fox invites her audience to slow down, take a moment, and enjoy the beauty of nature.
“Paying attention outside is a very meditative task. And the more attention you pay to something, the more you’ll appreciate it,” she said.