Art in America October 2007 – John Evans at Gallery Henoch

John Evans is a Boston based painter of seascapes and landscapes; his subjects range from the coast of Cape Cod and the North Shore of Massachusetts to the meadows of central France. Painting in oil, often on large canvases, Evans offers what seem to be requiems for less frantic, more easygoing times, and viewers may well have mixed feelings on seeing such grand vistas of shoreline and sea in a time of damaging ecological change. The isolated objects in his paintings - boats and docks - are stand-ins for human presences that cannot compete with the visual grandeur of his spacious views. Study of the works ultimately shows Evans to be not so much elegiac as romantic, favoring habitats that allow him to fallow his penchant for epic naturalism.


Part of the paintings' splendor stems from their generous dimensions: Beach on Moody Day (2007) is 8 by 6 feet. More than half the canvas is devoted to the sky, which looms above a light brown beach punctuated by a few walkers, boats and shallow pools. The sky is dark gray and somewhat menacing in the upper region to the right; elsewhere, a milder blue is interrupted by a few cumulus clouds hanging over a distance shore. The sky again dominates in the slightly smaller Maine with Goodman's Dock (2006). Thick clouds float in a light-blue haze above a spit of land ending in a pier. Here the sea is idyllic; the foreground shallows are dark, perhaps moody, but the open water reflects the glorious sky.


Wide River (2006), still smaller, offers a thick band of evergreens on the edge of a river. The various greens exquisitely represent trees and shrubs that come to the very edge of the water, which reflects the overall patterns of the vegetation. In the middle of the river there are some patches of yellow and red leaves that enliven the mellow scene.


– Jonathan Goodman



Artnews June 2007 – John Evans, Gallery Henoch

John Evans’s landscapes are poised between depictions of the natural world and the constructed reality of oil paint that has been brushed, rolled with a brayer, palette - knifed, scraped away, and repainted — repeatedly — to produce a surface that looks like raw silk. Picasso tells us that “a picture is the sum of its destructions." In expansive canvases like Evans's 6-by-9 foot Transparency & Reflection (2007), that sum is carefully calculated so that each and every brushstroke seem to occupy a distinct spatial location. A handful of representational elements — buoys, bright little boats, and, occasionally, beachcombers — were artfully scattered throughout his coastal scenes in ways that give Evans's illusory space a sense of specificity.


The beaches, bays, skim tides, and luminous skies of Maine and Massachusetts are motifs that the artist has depicted with increasing adroitness over the years. But attractive as these littoral vistas were, the most ambitious works in this eloquent show were scenes of France. French Field & Pond (2006) represents an autumnal European Version of Wayne Thiebaud's alluvial deltas.


Rocamodor II (2006) is filled with conical trees that dovetail with wedge-shaped fields, groves, and roads: Cézanne's turf. In this standout painting, the viewer's eye is drawn to a red-roofed white building that is perched atop far-off rolling hills. Haloed with pale, blocky, brushstrokes and set against an otherwise darkening sky, the building glows like a light source. The eye lingers there, in the distance, where a sense of the sublime prevails.


– Gerard Haggerty



Painting is an act of faith. – John Evans

Artists of the Romantic movement in the 19th century wrestled earnestly to express their experience of what they called "Sehnsucht", a profound sense of inner longing in the presence of the transcendent, numinous other (be it nature, or a beloved, or God). The best art revealed this subject/object relationship where we come to recognize both ourselves and something outside of ourselves. The idea of Sehnsucht continues to have power today, because what lies at its heart, the terrible awareness of our simultaneous isolation and connectedness, is so deeply woven into the fabric of the human condition.


Sehnsucht is at the core of John Evans's paintings. If you ask him what drives him to paint the landscapes and seascapes that he loves, he will tell you it is a mental state he calls ' ecstasy .' His radar is calibrated to register those moments when nature presents itself ecstatically, without his having even to seek them. This is because he understands intuitively that the Numinous, that Other which lies behind and beneath and beyond mere visual appearance, is ever poised to reveal itself in what seem to be the most mundane shapes glimpsed in time: the slope of a country road into the distance: the angle of a dinghy lying forlorn on a dusky beach; a solitary, dark tree hovering wildly on a seaside cliff, or a pair of anonymous, mastless boats whose prows chance to align momentarily as they drift languidly in opposite directions. The humble dignity and simplicity of the subject matter is sublimated in flickering planes of luminous color both in the earlier works in this exhibition, in which a great density of marks reveals the vastness of space and light from within, and also in the newer, larger works, without visible horizon, a boat or two recalling figural isolation and intimacy.


The world seen in John Evans ' paintings is composed of beautiful interlocking shapes, in turn awkward and then elegant, that alternately either dissolve into one another or assert their identities to cleave earth from sky, horizon from punctuating vertical forms (trees, piers, signposts) though land and air, vertical and horizontal, are always united by the vitality of the marks and the feeling of accumulated light arrested. The landscape in Evans' paintings is occasionally agitated, sometimes at rest, but almost always silent, a silence from which the radiance of the spirit grows. He assembles different moments of day and place, each with its own particular qualities of light, into a new whole so as to arrive at not so much a summary of the landscape as a revelation of the experience of being in it and outside of it at the same time. Perspective becomes a centripetal force, pulling the viewer in; yet at the same time the dense surface textures, scraped and scratched, mottled and scumbled, crusty, hard-fought, well-traveled by eye and hand, sanded down and then rebuilt again, halt entry into space and concentrate visual energy on the flatness of the picture plane.


Therein lies the key to what separates Evans ' vision from the transcendentalism of the Romantics: it is mediated by the lens of Modernism. Cezanne, cubism, and expressionism have not gone unnoticed. Evans studied with James Weeks and Philip Guston at Boston University, where realism and expressionism respectively were the coin of the realm, so their union in his work seems to have a certain prophetic inevitability. The work on exhibit synthesizes the landmarks on a journey from realism and painterly geometric abstraction through an expressionism akin to Kokoschka's landscapes and finally to his heart's true home: immersion in the sublime in plein-air forays to Cape Cod, the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York, and anywhere else the Numinous might reveal itself in nature.


– Clifford Davis Associate Professor of Art Rivier College, Nashua, New Hampshire



The progress of an artist is a curious phenomenon to track. The rare genius, like Picasso, grows by leaps and bounds, changing tack every few years (or even months) to move into ever more fruitful and explosive terrain. At the opposite end of the spectrum are painters like Giorgio Morandi and Amedeo Modigliani, who quietly settle into a groove to pursue a satisfying signature style for the span of a long or brief career.


More the norm--and often more rewarding for the serious student of art--is the artist who struggles for years before finding a voice that is emphatically his own. Such is the case with John Evans, whose latest paintings signal his arrival to what the artist calls a "consistent point of view" and what a critic recognizes as an approach to looking at the world and handling paint that is, in the sum of its parts, like no other's.


For much of his career, Evans worked in the hallowed American tradition of gestural painting, a calling made nearly sacred by several giants of the last century, including Philip Guston, who was one of Evans's teachers at Boston University, and whose delicate touch still lives on in this body of work. From another teacher, James Weeks, the artist learned a way of tackling huge expanses of space--the vastness of land, ocean, and sky--in a way that strives for an almost classical balance of forms.


It is these two tendencies that come together in Evans's most recent paintings. There is still the same building-up and scraping-down beloved of painterly painters from Titian to de Kooning. This repeated searching for a balance of color and light leads paradoxically to a crusted, tactile surface that is nonetheless infused with light. The great danger of this kind of painting for the practitioner is getting lost in the oozy seductions of the oil medium. But Evans finds a way of anchoring the luminous flux: The bright orange disk and slice of shoreline in Moon & Boat immediately draw the eye into the scene and act almost as lightning rods for all the incredible gradations of subtle color. In similar fashion, the nearly indecipherable small forms of Wide Beach with Boats & Buoys act as an anchor for a misty terrain that might otherwise wander off into incoherence. As Evans moves into ever more abstract ways of seeing and painting, it's worth noting that these familiar seaside motifs--boats, fishermen, piers--lose their interest as isolated shapes. And many of the works, but particularly String of Boats and Boats & Clouds , hover on the brink of dissolving into pure atmosphere (a development peculiar to the late works of another devotee of seascapes, J. M. W. Turner).


Evans's preferred locations are the northeast beaches and waters of Maine, Plum Island, and Provincetown, but at this juncture in time they could be any of the remaining unsullied seacoasts of the northern hemi-sphere. He is approaching a kind of universality, what might even be called transcendence in the tradition of 19th-century painters and philosophers. The artist himself sums up his achievement the most succinctly: "Ultimately," he says, "the paintings are spiritual. They're classic in their concern for the ambiguity of two- and three-dimensional space, but they're also theaters that invite meditation."


– Ann Landi is a contributing editor of ARTnews and author of the Schirmer Encyclopedia of Art



The Intimacy of Deep Space

The paintings of John Evans reveal a transcendent Iove affair with the New England coast. While studying at Boston University, John first came into regular contact with the rocky islands, secretive wetlands and beaches that frame the Atlantic. Now the places of solitude that John seeks are becoming increasingly rare; as population densities along the coast explode, uninterrupted vistas are replaced by expansive highways and anonymous architecture. However, the raw beauty of the coast survives in key locations, and John knows where to find every one of these spots. These days he frequents two favorite locations to make his oil-stick drawings: Plum Island in northern coastal Massachusetts, and Truro, one of Edward Hopper's favorite Cape Cod haunts. In these drawings, used as preparatory studies and as complete works in their own right, John records the blossoming grasses of Plum Island in spring, and in fall, the blazing rich hues which this same ground displays. In summer, John draws and paints the dunes of Truro, an otherworldly place of hypnotic, undulating sand.


Both of these locales, and other special sites throughout New England where John works, embody deep, epic spaces that John has come to know intimately. After years of working on site, he has distilled a cast of characters from these vistas that form a private language: the ocean light that saturates the early morning and late day skies, the grand, changeable clouds and the land and sea punctuated by isolated, lonely forms.


In every sense, John Evans is a painterly painter. He embraces a process that is ritualistically slow, primordially direct and unpredictably physical. Throughout the history of art, from the "Flung Ink" painters of ancient China to Willem De Kooning, the physical act of pushing, flinging and dripping paint is given unbridled authority to unmask the truth of a subject. The hand becomes a third eye, one that records vision through touch. For the painterly painter, the aesthetic experience lies between the unexpected marks and the clear retinal image. A painting must take on a life separate from its subject in order to reveal its inherent truth. To arrive at this essence is often a prolonged, arduous task fraught with missteps that require ruthless editing and great patience.


In Italian, the word pentimento (plural, pentimenti) means "repentance," and is used by artists to describe the residue of erased, scrubbed out or painted-over marks in a drawing or painting. These marks are evidence of a profound self-criticism, a repentance borne out of the belief that a painting can reflect the truth of a subject. Consequently, the painterly painter also bears the burden of knowing that getting halfway to the truth is no truth at all. It is important to remember that these marks are not aesthetically made but are the ghostlike remains of marks that have been unmade. The late paintings of Rembrandt and Titian are superb examples of this uncompromising painterly process. Their crusty surfaces barely disguise an exhaustive process of revision that sacrifices aesthetic elegance, qualities both artists could readily achieve",for structural power and psychological depth.


In the twentieth century, the drawings and paintings of Alberto Giacometti, Willem De Kooning and Philip Guston John Evans's teacher at Boston University) share a legacy of having been relentlessly erased and reconstructed. One of the best descriptions of this process is James Lord's 1965 account of Giacometti's working methods. Virtually the entire account is of Giacometti's obsessive scrubbing out of Lord's portrait again and again, a process rooted in the duality of Giacometti's sisyphean hopelessness of ever reaching his goal, but his deep satisfaction in trying.1


In a similar way, one can presume that if Philip Guston had accepted his elegant abstractions of the 50s as the final summation of his career, he never would have found the visual syntax for his late, great figurative paintings. These late, disturbing narratives are hidden in the liquid abstractions that immediately precede them. Fortunately for us, Guston felt an inner need to battle with his amorphous forms and, as a result, released his Ku Klux Klansmen, spiders and bare light bulbs, and Mr. Magoo cars.


So it is with John Evans's thick, crusty, hard-won depictions of the New England landscape. He goes out to paint something elusive, something hiding in the islands offshore or among the scrub trees, old boathouses and docks along the coast; something intangible but nevertheless palpably real. To reveal this intangible thing, he will exhaustively rework a painting in his studio. Oftentimes years after a painting has dried, John will reconsider its merits, get out his belt sander and obliterate whole sections, sometimes making holes in the canvas that require patching. Too, I have often heard John ruthlessly criticize the state of one of his paintings, but in the same sentence express a reverent wonder about the motif. I have been in his painting van when he suddenly pulls over to study a row of trees silhouetted against the sky or catching the last light of sunset. His enthusiasm is transcendental in the Emersonian tradition and he delights in the work of other painters who share that reverence, from Brueghel to James Weeks, one of John's most influential teachers at Boston University.


On a recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, John and I found ourselves in front of the great Brueghel landscape, The Harvesters.2 John began to describe its drawing as a musical web of patterns and rhythms that defines an expansive space of abstract horizontal and vertical planes, punctuated by intimate details. As he spoke, it became clear that he was describing his own work as well, that he had before him an art historical equivalent of his own aesthetic goals. As a painter, John has absorbed many lessons from his predecessors and their work, and is constantly returning to them for what more they can teach.


When discussing the work of his favorite artists, from Brueghel to DeKooning, and his teachers, Guston and Weeks, John frequently punctuates his descriptions with the word "sensual" as a standard of physical beauty achieved by these artists. Like his favored predecessors, John makes pieces that are at times pugilistic, at times gentle, but always physical. His oil paint may be runny and translucent, or troweled onto the canvas inches thick; at other times it is scrubbed on. As he builds up and breaks down his painted surfaces over time, his goal is to develop the painting's "sensuality." And the colors John uses further add to the sensual nature of his work. Soft pinks and blood reds resonate with the greens of fir and spruce trees. Blues the color of cake frosting contrast with hot yellows and oranges.


Like Brueghel, John punctuates his landscapes with details distilled from the motif, but in the way they are drawn, they appear as half-formed shapes that could easily disappear. Scrub bushes, trees, old boathouses and docks tremble and appear ready to change their identity. Clouds, on the other hand, look dense and opaque, as if to frame and counterbalance the unstable forms in a large space below.


John is, like his work, open and generous, but solitary. So, it is no wonder that he returns often to the deserted hills and beaches of the New England coast. He places his elusive forms at a great distance from the viewer, creating a deep space of contemplation.


– THOMAS LYON MILLS January 2001


Thomas Lyon Mills is a painter and an Associate Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island.


1. Lord, James. A Giacometti Portrait. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday and Co., for the Museum of Modern Art, 1965.

  1. 2.Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525-1569), The Harvesters, 1565, oil on wood, 46V2 x 63V4", The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1919.



John Evans: Henoch

Alternately serene and dramatic, John Evans's radiant representations of the Cape Cod coast and upstate New York's Mohawk Valley are always thoughfully composed. His landscapes depict clouds scudding over empty shorelines and silhouetted piers, and vivid little boats and the reflecitons they cast. Seen at a distance, the works' interlocking triangles and generally rectilinear organization appear arranged but altogether natural. Up close, much of the brushwork looks like small blocks that buttress the banded overview.


Like one of the motifs that he favors, Evans's working method involves the calm that follows the storm. His luminous paint surface is initially built up with brush and palette knife. After the thick oil paint dries, it's smoothed down with a mechanical sander. Repeated additions and subtractions yield a thin, multilayered surface that lets light pass through translucent color to strike a white gesso ground and reflect back toward us.


Sometimes the atmosphere is quiet. Seemingly effortless works like The Beach and Two Boats evoke the sparse elegance of chamber music. In these images, a few bright dinghies and mooring posts punctuate vast areas of still, pewter-colored water and economically define space. The whole ensemble is at play in The Links, which represents sandy bluffs and scrubby hills rolling beneath a cobalt blue sky. This ambitious canvas captures a sense of place and something more: the sensation of wrestling nature onto the canvas, and enterprise that's difficult and delightful in equal measure.


– Gerard Haggerty, New York Reviews, Summer 2003, ARTnews



REVIEW

There is a special luminosity arising from most of John Evans' seven works at the Allan Stone Gallery created by a most complex and intricately worked surface. While there are some odd viewer angles, and a virtuoso display of the palette knife at work, the final impact of each work - or, rather, each but one - is neither novel or spectacular, but rather appealing, a display of light as color, and color is clearly at the command of the artist. Up close all is revealed, the strokes and smears, the overworkings and underpaintings, much is direct and all continue to make a painting no matter how close one creeps - the surface does not collapse into the means, the brushwork, but retains the image.


The best distance is at ten or so feet where the surface tends to blend and set, the light spread, and the flash and glitter of hand takes its proper place. And the impact often is not flash and glitter, but a glowing sensuality arising from a specific place transformed into paintings that are often as close to Abstract-Expressionist exercise as conventional landscapes. Yet, they are and remain landscapes, would not work upside down, would not work but for the subject, the scene. They are thus what they are: landscapes shaped with a concentration of painterliness that only once or twice interferes with the total image.


One work River Charles, 1991, somehow seems to fail on all accounts, lacks luminosity, lacks evidence of great skill of hand - and so, one assumes, must be an artist favorite, its other virtues and other charms not visible to the innocent eye. It was also made in 1991, and most of the others more recently, so perhaps times for Evans have changed for the better.


Generally, there is a great weeding out before a show so that what is displayed has, perhaps, a greater coherence than the daily results out of the studio. This does not, however, seem to be the case with the work here - even excluding River Charles - for all are special in special ways, and yet all very much possessed of the same virtues, same use of paint, exude the same luminosity, display a similar means. Yet big or small, one is intimate and another public, one displays the means boldly and another more subtly - in a sense the means are not subtl but their result is. The means are splots and dabs and the deployment of the entire spectrum of color, often smeared on, dabbed in. And the smears and dabs, each a risk and most achieve a success, falter only when they run close to cliche': a dab of red as flower. Mostly, however, what impresses is the meld of means that shapes each work into a special variant. And these works do not require a special eye, for in the end they charm, glitter with color, glow on Stone's walls.


– JBB, Review, Reviews & previews of current exhibitions in New York March 1, 1997

© John Evans 2008 © Design BMKCreative 2008. All rights reserved.

Reviews