Reviews & Media Acknowledgements
Only God can help the badly dressed. Spanish Proverb
When Carolyn Evans comments on the role of color in her paintings she speaks as if getting dressed for an evening out. As she considers her palette she wants to know "what will go with this outfit." She'll point out an accent of green here and another of purple there that pull her composition together. Evans believes that "color is personal" adding that she "paints like I dress", and she is a well-dressed woman who enjoys the look and feel of good clothing. Fashion can be trivial or at least frivolous but clothing is another matter. How someone presents herself in the world can be frivolous, but it is never trivial. It was Oscar Wilde who pointed out the folly of failing to judge by appearances.
Evans's sense of color is bold. Her colors don't always "match" or go together in conventional ways. When they do blend the result is often playful. She favors bright, industrial-strength 20th century American color. Even in darker passages these colors are exuberant. When Evans tones down her palette she may remind you of a louder Milton Avery. At full throttle her color seems to have flared from the imagination of an especially rambunctious child, but it must be that she is a painter in tune with what she really likes to see.
Evans is a painter of imaginary landscapes and still lifes. She began as a sculptor, and she retains a sculptor's sense of form. Her houses-a preoccupation-are elemental: peaked roof, walls, a door and perhaps a window. They are being drawn right this minute in classrooms around the world where they are recognized as a sign of stability and emotional comfort, as home. In Evans's art they have a grounded foursquareness. Her houses are, in her words, "where I want to be." But they are also shells that can be placed in whatever landscape she fancies. In "Balancing Act" the house teeters on a huge boulder suggesting the essential precariousness of all our attempts to stay rooted in one place.
The homemade, clunky architecture of Evans's houses is like nothing this New Orleans native has ever lived in, but she places them in landscapes she has seen. "Imaginary landscapes?" "Seen." This is not the contradiction it seems. Growing up in the flat delta landscape of New Orleans instilled in Evans a love of hills and hills are a dominant landscape feature in many of her paintings. Since she lives and works in New England hills surround her, but she is not a painter who works or even sketches plein air. She has long had hills on the brain and now summons them up out of her mental landscape. The same is true of the trees that frequently appear in her paintings. These stubby, flaring upward unknown-to-botany trees have been a favorite form since childhood. That Evans who grew up beside the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchatrain is drawn to water is no surprise. (She also spent time in Magnolia on Boston's North Shore as a child.) Life by water, trees, houses and the curtain-like storms that swept across the flat horizons of her childhood are Evans's vocabulary. From these she creates landscapes that are physically present but on no map. They may connect with some view remembered from traveling. Or they may excite that area of the imagination where the words house, tree, etc. mean something even if we have no literal house or tree in mind.
For Carolyn Evans as for her audience the reality of what is on canvas has to be in the art itself. Painting of the sort Evans does is a through-the-looking-glass experience, one in which viewers expect to be transported, pulled through the mirror by her color and form. As for color Evans does not need God's aid. In terms of form she evokes a physicality that can be felt in both the tactile and emotional senses.
Perhaps the painter Evans most resembles at her best is Marsden Hartley. Like Hartley Evans can cause you to think that lack of tradition can be an American virtue. The American painter does not have to refine or overturn what has gone before. Her job-the most American of words-is to follow cheerfully or mordantly, depending on her temperament, what is personal in her engagement with the world she is determined to paint. It is never easy for artists to accept what they see for themselves. There are too many "standards" troubling their vision and causing doubt. In his landscape painting Hartley went for what he called "solidity of sensation." There is a similar drive and achievement in the paintings of Carolyn Evans.
William Corbett
Not Child's Play
" Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after he grows up. Pablo Picasso
That Carolyn Evans has solved the problem to which Picasso refers is abundantly clear in this exhibition of her recent large, luminous canvases. These whimsical vistas not only relate to the art of several 20th century masters but also clearly evoke the unselfconscious creation of a child's mind. The paintings are, at once, both deceptively sophisticated and disarmingly simple. Moreover, they are not the work of a naive or untutored creator, but of one trained in a traditional course of fine arts instruction.
In addition to Evans' uninhibited painting methods, the familiar subjects of her canvases also recall the art of children. For instance, those recurring houses represent the familiarity of family and home; or the boats, which may symbolize the journey of life or the spirit of adventures and discovery. And certainly Evans keeps distinguished company among eminent predecessors, in addition to Picasso, who have embrace the art and innocence of the very young. Paul Klee, for example, "aspired to achive a naive and untutored quality" in his creations, while Jean Dubuffet, that champion of Art Brut, remarked that " I allowed myself carte blanche to paint in perfect liberty... without troubling to cast a critical gaze upon my work, and experimenting in all directions." Traversing a similar artistic path, Carolyn Evans has stated " I am driven by my freedom and the wonderment..."
Daniel Piersol, New Orleans Museum of Art
Safe As Houses
Colorful and expressive paintings explore memories of fishing the Louisiana Gulf coast with her father, or wandering the port of New Orleans to view the small boats and large container ships that filled the Mississippi. Houses sit perched at the edge of these watery vistas-- reoccurring symbols of a safe place where children can be nurtured and grow.
Ironically, she couldn't wait to leave her childhood home. A conflicted relationship with her parents enforced Evans' desire to leave a society that she saw discriminating against Blacks and against her personally-- both as a Jew and as a woman. "From the age of fifteen, I was ready to run away," she remembers when describing her life before coming north for college. "I couldn't wait to be free."
Settling outside Boston to raise her family, Evans was determined to make her home on a hill "a joyous, hopeful place," to which her children might "want to come back." But in her mind, she nursed the idea of returning to New Orleans, an idea that began to seem possible when her mother died and her childhood home stood empty. But not five months after her mother's death, Hurricane Katrina removed this possibility. Evans sold what remained of her flooded home, filled with doubt that she'd ever return there to live.
But memory is a powerful thing, forcing the painter to meditate on deceptively naive shapes that make loss visible. In The Cumquat Tree Thrives, the viewer sees a house nearly obscured by a cumquat tree--all that remained when flooding destroyed the exotic garden that her mother had filled with fruit trees and tropical plants.
In the Edge depicts a ship cruising past houses rising on stilts from the middle of a swamp, a seemingly benign landscape tempered by our knowledge that those commercial vessels compromised the ecology of the region. Day at the Breach reveals the deceptive calm after the storm when placid, sunlit waters break through the levee to destroy New Orleans. Reaching back into childhood, Evans paints an old slave shack on her family's sugar plantation, where their cook once lived. Placed at the top of a patchwork composition of fields and river--a conscious nod to the quilt-making traditions among women in the Afro-American community-- Lovey's House , promises that home and memory might somehow be put together and made right.
Much has been made of the simplified shapes, which Evans has used throughout her career. She has been consistently compared to Picasso and Klee, painters also inspired by children's art. Although Evans insists that he was "not one of my heroes," a discerning viewer will see the influence of Hofmann in her carefully composed, and carefully selected, blocks of color. Like Rothko, a painter whom Evans does admire, she uses shape and color to generate emotion--shape and color that gather force when viewed abstractly. Although her pictures tell a story, we must be mindful that narrative is only part of what Evans sets out to explore.
Evans is fond of saying that painting is "an act of desperation." Recent work reveals that she is an artist desperate to remember--and equally desperate to forget. In an attempt to make light of what was an ecological and emotional disaster, she refers to Katrina as "the show of shows." Smash Hit describes the flood's dramatic impact in the glow of a red sun setting between battered palms. Opening Night shows a large white cloud enveloping the top of a house that is surrounded by rising water. In painting after painting, Evans describes a complex idea of home as a place where you might not wish to physically return, but are devastated when return is no longer possible.
Katherine French, Director Danforth Museum of Art
"Carolyn Evans combines monumental form with whimsical freedom, an unusually tricky proposition that she pulls off brilliantly. Her works are powerful, sophisticated statements that are simultaneously witty and wonderfully evocative of a childhood's fresh vision of the world."
Howard Farber, Artspeak, New York, NY
"'It's the act of painting I like, the surprise I get. I'm not concerned with reality at all," she says. She paints with anything that's handy: brushes, knife, sticks, fingers, a printmaker's roller. She scrapes and overpaints; she sometimes turns a painting sideways or upside down. 'Design, color, composition - they still have to work."'
Marty Carlock, The Boston Sunday Globe, Boston, MA
Finger Painting
In the early ‘90s, as a lark, Evans began experimenting with oils. Initially, she took a knife and dug into the gobs of paint on her husband’s palette and applied it to plywood. “I’d build a painting like I would build a sculpture,” she says. Evans played with the paint. “I had nothing to lose,” she explains. “In my mind, I was a sculptor.” But encouraged by Stone, she soon began to view herself as a painter.
Today, Evans enjoys the commercial success that eluded her before. Her works, which sell for up to $18,000, are displayed in galleries in Atlanta, Boca Raton, Martha’s Vineyard, and New Orleans and at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Like the willful Boston University undergrad, she still bristles at artistic conventions. She attacks the canvas with brushes, knives, sticks, anything she can get her hands on - hands included. “If I don’t like it, I’ll take my hands and smush it. It’s all spontaneous. If I couldn’t paint that way, if I had to go by some sort of rules, I’d probably shoot myself,” she says.
Evans says behind each of her paintings is a story. Recall her description of “Night Watch”: She loves to anthropomorphize things, especially houses. Windows become eyes; roofs, hair; a dab of red, a mouth. In “Goin’ to the Jazz Fest,” a house jauntily cruises across the waves into town. In “Smash Hit,” a pair of “totally whacked out” palm trees compare notes after the storm, she explains. “These guys are saying to each other: ‘What happened to you?’ ‘What happened to you?’ “
She spends a lot of time thinking about her titles. She says they usually come to her just before she finishes a work. They’re usually quirky and possess double, if not triple meanings. As angry as she may be feeling - be it about Katrina or global warming or the Iraq war - she insists that she’s an optimist. “I want to emote that life is good, that I want to see the beauty of things,” Evans says. “You can find joy if you look for it. You can find the terrible things too, but you shouldn’t dwell on them.”
Carolyn Evans’s work is at the Danforth Museum, Framingham, through Oct. 19. 508-620-0050
Steve Maas, The Boston Globe
"Carolyn Evans offers charming works whose forms have the fluid grace of Picasso in high spirits and the whimsical lightness of Miro."
Miles Unger, Art New England, Boston, MA
"Evans exercises her imagination on the canvas. A directness is evident in her work where brilliant washes of color are sometimes confined to a corner and others are set free across the canvas. Images emerge as the paint is applied and scraped away. Familiar shapes, perhaps those of barns and boats stimulate the viewers' curiosity and offer accommodations in an imaginary world, brilliant with color. Paintings of almost childlike and playful fish, boats and houses are invented and remembered places translated in Evans' unique expression."
Melissa Wertman, Provincetown Magazine, Provincetown, MA
Carolyn Evans An Artist Finds Her Place In The Eye Of The Storm
NATICK - Carolyn Evans couldn’t wait to escape her native New Orleans, yet on canvas after canvas she returns to the Gulf Coast.
Evans grew up feeling claustrophobic in a home where the windows were rarely opened, but houses are her favorite image.
She seethes with indignation over government culpability in the Katrina catastrophe, but whimsy rather than wrath infuses her artwork.
Evans’s contradictions may be as tangled as her thicket of dark hair, but spend an afternoon with the South Natick artist, and it all starts to make sense.
The Danforth Museum in Framingham is presenting Evans’s show “Katrina’s Third Birthday, No Cake” through Oct. 19. The title is playful, but with an edge - like her work and the woman herself.
After Katrina swamped her hometown, it was as if a levee burst inside Evans. Though she hasn’t lived in New Orleans for more than 40 years, the storm unleashed a torrent of emotions: fury at the environmental degradation that left New Orleans so vulnerable to catastrophe, contempt for the government’s abysmal response to the hurricane, and, on a personal level, anguish over the loss of the house that had been in her family since the ‘40s - a place that evokes memories both warm and bitter.
Not that any of this would be immediately apparent from her work. Evans is not one to browbeat viewers with messages. Rather, she chooses to be subtle and tongue-in-cheek, while sticking to the conviction that art should be timeless. “In the end, the painting has to work as a painting,” Evans says. The pictures “are political, but you don’t need to know that to appreciate them.”
Her husband and fellow artist, John Evans, describes her at work: “She starts with a Rorschachian mess, just throwing paint on the canvas - and then something will spark a memory.”
Carolyn Evans says she takes whatever happens to be on her palette and washes the canvases - which range from 10 inches to 70 inches in width - with color. She likens her sweeping motions to dancing, an art form she practiced when she was younger. While she paints, jazz echoes through her two-story-high studio, and she riffs along with the musicians. “You move from one area to the next until it starts to have some sort of composition, stuff happening,” Evans says. “Then you start pushing the composition.”
In “Night Watch,” the “stuff happening” happened to be the houses that took shape in the upper right of the canvas; the rest of the painting emerged from there. The roof of the house on the right started out as a random smudge. Only later did Evans realize that it resembles “a hat or a doo-rag.” “These things happen in paintings for me,” she says. “I don’t know why.”
Standing on stilts, with a tree in the foreground, the houses are “sort of dancing” the night away, she says. But the houses have a serious mission as well. “They are looking out on the water, telling the tree that he’s going to be all right. And he’s growing back. Houses abound in Evans’s work. “These houses are all me,” she says. “They’re autobiographical. I grew up in a dysfunctional house.”
Southern Inhospitality
Evans was raised in a large house - “like those you’d find in Wellesley or Weston,” she says - just outside New Orleans. Her great-grandfather had been a shoe peddler who made the rounds of the countryside accompanied by a mule bearing samples. Her grandfather started a shoe wholesale business and, during the Depression, acquired a sugar plantation in return for a loan to a farmer who had fallen on hard times. As young girls, Evans and her sister visited the plantation, which still had its slave shacks.
Evans says her own parents were not particularly attentive to their daughters. “They liked living high at the country club or night clubbing,” she says. But her memories of going fishing with her dad left an impression; her art is well-stocked with aquatic life, often where you’d least expect to find it. Her mother’s influence shows in the paintings as well. Evans’s houses are generally open to the elements, a reaction to her mother’s insistence on keeping the windows shut to the steamy Gulf weather. Evans says it was really the family’s servants - “my black relatives” - who raised her and her sister.
That was common, she says, among the privileged Southern girls with whom she played and partied. That charmed life, though, came to an abrupt end: “When I was 16, when all the kids I’d gone to school with were coming out as debutantes, I was left out because my last name was Rosenberg.” back to the Boston area in 1981 and set about making their living as artists while raising two children.
A Sculptor Finds A Happy Medium In Paint
Her mother told her to ignore the anti-Semitism, to just let the insults roll off her back. But she couldn’t. Nor could she ignore the fact that her father’s warehouse (now a venue of the House of Blues) had separate bathrooms for each race. Refusing to tolerate Southern intolerance, she headed north to college - 1,500 miles north. Evans studied art at Boston University. Early on, she says, she felt stifled in the drawing courses; she wasn’t interested in spending hours trying to reproduce the perfect egg. “I wanted to be original,” Evans says. One teacher suggested switching to art history. Instead she majored in sculpture, earning a bachelor of fine arts. Along the way she met John, whom she married in 1970.
After holding traditional jobs - she teaching school, he working in advertising and then as college professor in Texas - they moved back to the Boston area in 1981 and set about making their living as artists while raising two children. Evans continued with sculpture, initially working in bronze and later with found objects. One piece includes empty paint tubes and their caps; another uses a stretched dish towel as a base. The sculptures are displayed throughout their spacious home, which the couple designed with the help of an architect. While her sculptures were exhibited at galleries in New York and at the DeCordova Museum, few of them sold. “Everybody can hang a painting,” Evans says. “Everyone has a wall. Not everyone knows what to do with a sculpture.” Meanwhile, demand grew for her husband’s paintings, which were promoted by the late New York art dealer Allan Stone (whose stable of artists included Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Wayne Thiebaud). “At least one of us was selling,” she says.
Waves of Grace
Natick painter seeks safe harbor after Katrina's devastation
After Hurricane Katrina roared through her childhood world, painter Carolyn Evans unleashed a storm across her own canvases.
From her Natick home studio, she salvaged the New Orleans where she was born and raised in the inflamed colors of memory and loss.
Stick-figure humans rush from the ocean. A surge of green and black waves batter a fragile house. A pitiless orange sun bakes the storm-soaked land.
Evans is showing 15 powerful new paintings this month at the Chase Gallery in Boston. They range in size from 14 inches to 70 inches across.
Like an ark of pigment and possibility, they carry her through a real and remembered deluge to comforting shores.
The exhibit, "Catching A Wave," runs through April 28. An artist's reception will be held tomorrow from 5 to 7 p.m. in the gallery at 129 Newbury St.
"New Orleans was always close to my heart . Once you've lost something, you realize how much you loved it, " said Evans, "I feel like I've lost the city I love."
Over the last two decades, Evans has created a signature style of simplified figures and shapes composed in enigmatic tableaux. She uses lush impasto to render her scenes with the lurid immediacy of a tropical fever.
Her paintings render the natural world with a childlike lucidity as if shimmering in gasoline vapors.
In an introduction to the catalog accompanying the show, Katherine French, director of the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, observes Evans' "simplified figures" have been compared to Pablo Picasso. Paul Klee and Mark Rothko. " She uses shape and color to generate emotion – shape and color that gather force when viewed abstractly," French wrote.
In several canvases, like " Water Dance," Evans incorporates symbolic figures reminiscent of Marc Chagall of fish-like clouds and houses with human. While these works convey a personal intensity. Evans said they also display the composition, color and spatial values of "traditionally good paintings." "I hope people come away seeing these as good, strong works," she said.
Evans is married to John Evans who has earned a national reputation for his gorgeous land and seascapes.
Carolyn Evans new works were born in the personal and collective turmoil of 2005.
Early that year, her mother died in New Orleans, leaving the family home in Old Metarie, Jefferson Parish, to Evans and her sister. Five months later, Katrina made her landfall, flooding the home in several feet of water.
"My paintings aren't playful anymore," Evans said. "They're about tragedy."
Over the last 20 years, Evans has shown her work in 26 solo exhibitions and more than 50 group shows. She described her work as depicting "the struggle about who I am." "They're dreamy but tell little stories if you look into them. I'm not sure everyone sees the same story," she said .
Evans' paintings are part of several public and private collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art and Wellington Management of Boston. In addition to the Chase Gallery, she shows her work at the Carol Craven Gallery in Vineyard Haven on Martha's Vineyard and the Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans.
In "Catchlng A Wave." Evans' new works reflect both private and public loss.
On one level, they evoke Katrina's devastating impact on me Gulf Coast in sinister tropical colors like an unhealed yet beautiful wound. Gardens are flooded, houses threatened, the natural equilibrium destroyed.
While she had left New Orleans 30 years ago to study in Boston and later marry, her family home had always preserved ties to her identity.
In images like "Goin' to the Jazz Fest" and "Day at the Breach," the once lively city has been inundated.
While her images do not seem overtly political, Evans blames the federal and local governments for a lack of preparedness that led to multiple fatalities and enormous property loss. "The anger comes because this didn't have to happen," she said. "A million people were displaced because (the government) didn't take action."
Yet viewers will also see Evans ' new works evoke the double - edge loss of her mother and the house where her family had lived for more than 5O years.
I'm trying to get out of this mode." She said . "But it comes back to haunt me."
After me house was flooded, she and her sister had to sell at a loss leaving her bereft of lifelong ties to an area that held powerful, if conflicted, memories.
"I've always painted like I've been on the edge of earth and sanity, judging from being an artist and a mother." Evans said. "I felt displaced. ...I wanted to enjoy New Orleans as a native."
While Evans' new work often suggests lost ties, one of her most striking canvases, "The Cumquat Tree Thrives," evokes a sense of human and natural equilibrium restored.
A tree offers fruit and shade. The sun shines but does not scorch. The storm has passed.
Like a swimmer daring riptides, Evans' new work carries her through fearful currents to the promise of a safe harbor.
By Chris Bergeron , MetroWest Daily News
" Now a mature artist, Evans is still infusing nature's basic elements with her own creative passions to make strikingly personal paintings."
" Powerful subconscious forces suggest images from her past - or a private place beyond memory."
Chris Bergeron, Metro West Daily News
A Multi Faceted Artist by Imran H. Khan
Carolyn Evans is both an artist and a sculptor. Her art appeals to both the child amongst us as well as the thinker. To me her art has been an acquired taste. When I first saw her painting of houses with fish floating in the air, I did not know what to make of it. But over time it is exactly those paintings that have stuck in my mind’s eye. Many of her paintings have an ambiguity that keeps the viewer’s mind active considerably beyond the time the visual pleasures have subsided.
Many of her paintings of houses have stories behind them. The house or home in these paintings is a place surrounded by memories, filled with laughter, joy and sadness, with an overwhelming feeling of what it means to be alive. These “homes” are places we want to visit, to remember and reflect upon. Sometimes the houses take on a persona and speak more of an individual or of a couple and their relationship with each other. Often the house is a place to go to find shelter or solace or make a political statement, or have a laugh. She blends her Southern sensibilities with those of New England where she ended up spending most of her life.
Carolyn Evans is a mature artist who has the ability to remind us of what is important in life. She disarms us with provocative and yet simple subject matter that is familiar. Her paintings are infused with levity and sophistication using color, form and images, telling stories that excite our senses. Evans’ paintings are filled with wonder and discovery in the many layers of paint and story.
“Evans” compositions are simple-looking, but far from simplistic, and the cockeyed geometry of both natural and man-made forms within them are carefully considered. She has the uncanny ability to suggest much and manipulate the viewer’s perceptions by adroitly refining nuances of shape, color and paint application.”‘
When all is said, it is the viewer who brings new interpretations to the stories of the work. Carolyn Evans leaves enough space to include in her paintings, our own past, our memories and our dreams.
As a former teacher, Carolyn Evans has long focused on symbolic shapes that recall childhood. Bronze landscapes display a simplified version of the flowers and trees that grew in her mother’s garden. Colorful and expressive paintings explore memories of’ fishing the Louisiana Gulf coast with her father, or wandering the port of’ New Orleans to view the small boats and large container ships that filled the Mississippi.
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after he grows up.” Pablo Picasso
That Carolyn Evans has solved the problem to which Picasso refers is abundantly clear. These whimsical vistas not only relate to the art of several 20th century masters but also clearly evoke the unselfconscious creations of a child’s mind. The paintings are, at once, both deceptively sophisticated and disarmingly simple. Moreover, they are not the work of a naive or untutored creator, but of one trained in a traditional course of fine arts instruction... more
Home Turf
" Evans' near-abstract compositions focus on simplified geometric shapes with layers of thinly-applied over-glazes creating a luminous effect. Evans creates a sense of spatial ambiguity"
by Judith Bonner The New Orleans Art Review
Media Acknowledgements
WYEF TV, New Orleans, LA
January 2009
The Times Picayune, New Orleans, LA
January 2009
Metrowest Daily News, Framingham, MA
October 2008
Boston Globe, Boston, MA
September 2008
Boston Globe, Boston, MA
April 2007
Metrowest Daily News, Framingham, MA
April 2007
New England Home, Newton, MA
Jan-Feb. 2007
Metrowest Daily News,Framingham, MA
December 2003
Boston Globe, Boston, MA
June 2003
Metrowest Daily News, Framingham, MA
May 2003
Gallery and Studio, New York, NY
December/January 2002
The New York Observer, New York, NY
September 17, 2001
Boston Arts, Boston, MA
Television Interview
Metrowest Daily News, Framingham, MA
January 31, 1999
Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, Nantucket, MA
June 1999
Metrowest Daily News, Framingham, MA
December 25, 1998
Boston Globe, Boston, MA
April 13, 1997
Provincetown Magazine, Provincetown, MA
August 1997
Provincetown Arts, Provincetown, MA
June 1996
Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA
June 1991
Art New England, Boston, MA
October/November 1991
Artspeak, New York, NY
June 1989
The Lexington Minute Man, Lexington, MA
September 1987
DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA
November 1986
Boston Globe, Boston, MA
December 1986