W
hen I meet Danny Fox outside of his Philadelphia studio apartment, he's not exactly what I expect "Danny Fox" to look like. The Danny Fox I meet is tall and lanky with a pale complexion, and despite the pale complexion the experience is more like looking at my own reflection than at the rugged, former high school quarterback I imagined "Danny Fox" to be. If this Danny Fox owns a football jersey, it's buried deep in a closet somewhere, because the wiry gentleman inviting me inside his home looks more car mechanic than ex-jock; just about everything he's wearing is dark blue, from the pants to the hooded sweatshirt to the battered cap, like a uniform. In fact, aside from his thick-framed glasses, the lone accoutrement to distinguish his appearance is the carefully primped handlebar mustache—not quite Salvador Dali, but far from run-of-themill—that extends from either side of his thin face. Once inside, he greets me warmly with a smile and a handshake and quickly apologizes for the clutter— his fault—and the cat smell—not his fault. He tells me he's cat-sitting for the weekend and suggests going to a nearby café where we can talk and escape the odor. As I walk through the doorway, I tell him I don't notice anything out of the ordinary in the air, that the clutter is no more than can be found in most city apart-
ments and that I'd like to talk to him where he does much of his work. Besides, I like the music coming from his speakers: Early-era Modest Mouse. As we get situated, he points out some of the older works hanging on the walls—silkscreen prints, stencils, typographies—even though he's mostly known for, and I'm mostly intrigued by, his calligraphic works. "My grandfather taught me calligraphy when I was a kid," he says. "I was the school"s calligrapher from junior high all the way through senior year." But it took a long time for Danny to make the connection between his calligraphy and the art he was trying to make. When he moved to Philadelphia from his childhood home in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, he immediately became enamored with the city's graffiti and wanted to be a part of the scene and make a name for himself. The only problem was that he found himself imitating, not emulating, what he was seeing. "I was trying to 'do' graffiti," Danny says. "I was just missing the whole point of it. Graffiti isn't a style, it's an act. Like, I could do the most beautiful penmanship, but if I put that on something illegally, that's graffiti, it's not the style of letter. And I was missing that. I thought I had to make the letters as crazy as possible, but I was missing a step because I didn't understand design
the skinned issue
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