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No one wants the New Year to
be melancholic, but it often is.
Chalk it up to fear. Standing
on the opaque surface of your
future inspires less wonder and
more apprehension with each
unresolved resolution; time
passes, as it always will, and that
which lies ahead grows daunting
when we realize that the
promise of the future is not, in
fact, promised. A basic truth –
surfaces are unsettling if you are
unsure of what supports them.
Among us fearful, one man delights
in the uncertain promises
of the surface. Edward Evans,
non-objective artist and Professor
Emeritus of art at Southwest
Minnesota, fuses the formal
stylings of the Old Masters with
the bravura, spontaneity, and
conceptual approach of the Abstract
Expressionists. His primary
tool? An airbrush. The result?
Masterpieces of illusory texture
and immense feeling. “Once, a
man came into the gallery with
two women and explained the
photographic process that he
thought was used for my pictures.
When the gallery director
told the man that these were
not photographs, the man said,
“they are not paintings” and
angrily left the gallery. I thought
that was cool.”
Evans’ images feel transposed
from a separate reality. But as
he likes to point out, “the paradox
of illusion and reality is not
a contradiction if we consider
‘illusion’ as one of the many shifting
realities of life.” His work is…
trippy. Evans’ sophisticated technique
and masterful implementation
of light emulsify creased
and embossed textures with vibrant
shards of color. The result
is both alien and distinctly human;
wrinkled fractals fold and
rut between hard linearity and
dimpled softness. A recent piece
entitled “Reconstruction” (2018,
acrylic on linen) evokes both the
embered facets of quartz and
the organic motion of flesh. Such
a playful use of form is incredibly
sensual, the subsequent images
stimulating and subjective. Evans
says it best – “the way we see
interests me.”
Evans began his career in the
early 1960s with time-consuming
hard edge paintings related to
optical art. “Because they were
exhibited in major museums, I
wanted to produce faster.” His
solution involved masked-off
shapes made with tape and
newspaper and gradients crafted
with spray cans of car paint. “At
that time, not even knowledgeable
New Yorkers were familiar
with airbrushes.” Evans tried thinning
acrylic paint with water to
use with an industrial spray painter
intended for cars. He leaned
even further into his fascination
with misleading surfaces, priming
and sanding his canvases
to more closely resemble photographic
paper. “Few people
knew what my paintings were. I
showed them to a gallery director
and she angrily told me
‘we do not show illusions in
this gallery.’”
Evans might be a master of
illusion, but his oeuvre is no side
show schtick. Any examination
of his work reveals a disquieting
depth to his presentation of surface.
The immensity of his scope
is hard to ignore when a single
image suggests a dusky hunk
of stone, a fingerprint, a swath
of rumpled silk, the tumultuous
ravines of a brain – Mother Earth
in one violent gradation. Take,
for example, the recent “Beyond
Low Earth” (2017-18, acrylic on
linen). Translucent ribbons of
color flow over the more classi
A conversation with Edward Evans
By Kate Dellis