Enchanted Evening Embers Fox

Artist Bio:

M. Hyatt is a painter from rural Kentucky whose sleepy fox paintings explore childhood wonder and the liminal hours of dawn and dusk. His work draws on memories of watching foxes move through farmland in ethereal light, moments that became the foundation for what he calls “the quiet hours.”

Working primarily in acrylic on canvas and found fabrics, Hyatt employs a visual language inspired by vintage children’s books and coloring books. His simplified forms and bold color choices create paintings that function as doorways, offering viewers access to states of perception and peace they thought they’d lost. The work has been described as carrying an inexplicable familiarity that bypasses conscious recognition.

Artist Statement:

I grew up on farmland, and the moments I remember most vividly are the hours of dawn and dusk. The humidity hung so thick you could see it, dew soaked the fields, and the sun set the landscape aflame. In that ethereal light, I’d watch foxes slip through the fields, and the world felt enormous, charged with a possibility I can’t name even now. Those moments were liminal, suspended between day and night, between the ordinary and something numinous. They will never return but the fox carries them for me. And I’ve learned it carries something similar for others, even if their childhoods looked nothing like mine.

These moments recur across human experience in different forms, but they share an essential quality: brief access to the way we experienced the world before we learned to see it analytically. My paintings attempt to hold that state and return it to the viewer. I call them the quiet hours.

My visual language is inspired by the children’s books and coloring books of yesteryear, the first art most of us encountered, the first images that taught us how pictures could contain worlds. By working in this vocabulary, I’m activating a form of visual memory that exists below conscious recognition. Viewers often describe an inexplicable familiarity, a sense of peace they cannot name. This is the work functioning as intended: not as decoration, but as a key to something they thought they’d lost.

The simplified forms and bold color mirror how memory actually works. Childhood recollections are emotionally acute yet formally simplified, vivid in feeling but imprecise in detail.

I am offering viewers a doorway to childhood perception itself, that state where the world felt infinite and fundamentally safe. When peace arrives without explanation, the painting has reached them.