I am a contemporary artist based in Sheffield, UK. I employ a range of creative strategies including close connection with academics, creative writers and graphic designers. My personal practice embraces a variety of drawing and painting styles, and I have recently expanded this to include collaborative projects in animation and video.

Both my personal and collaborative practices are used to explore aspects of our physical and emotional relationship with nature; something that I consider to be ‘a complex response to a complex field of interactions’.

Although this web site is intended as a central hub, from which connections to these various aspects – or portfolios – of my practice can be reached, the principle focus of the site is on painting. This is the discipline from within which I began my art practice and the discipline to which I repeatedly return … and always with renewed fascination.

Statement

Although inspired by the modernist canon of Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel – at least with regard to the notion of exploring/exploiting the material potentialities of paint and ground – my paintings are resolutely contemporary.

Looking back to Philip Guston’s statement that “The painting … moves in a mind”, my aim is to develop this concept to evoke a new and intimate relationship between viewer and canvas; a relationship where the painting moves in the experience of both body and mind. The subtle use of refractory materials such as mica, along with carefully managed variations in surface lustre, transparency and opacity, delicacy and bravura of mark making, chaotic and controlled colour – all encourage an embodied response. The viewer physically negotiates many nuances of surface quality in a tactile, sensually engaged way that unravels through a ‘reverse apprehension’ of the accretion of elements built up on and within the surface or skin of the painting.

Liquid thinking

I revel in the viscosity and flow of paint. This is what James Elkins, in What Painting Is, refers to as “liquid thinking”: a mysterious alchemical process governed by it’s own self imposed rules and logic. By applying paint in both upright and horizontal planes, I therefore aim to exploit the drying, dripping and sedimentary processes to the full. Flooding the canvas on the floor allows beautiful tide marks to appear as the paint dries. When the canvas is in the vertical plane, drips create a gravity-driven dynamic.

Although there is a great deal of risk in this process, the results – with their direct correlation to processes that occur in nature – are often meditative in affect.

Designo y Colore

Designo y Colore – literally drawing and painting – creates a dialogue on the surface of my canvases. Drawing has been described as being essentially ‘transparent’ in its effect, whilst paint can be used in forms that are both transparent and opaque. On the canvas, layers of medium are used to preserve elements of transparent drawing, while opaque layers of paint are used to reconfigure structure from the mitigated chaos of liquid process.

Watercolour on paper

My works in watercolour on paper have been described as being ‘like photographs’. This quality, which might arise from the vivid, visceral colours and the tension between actual and illusory space adds ‘depth’ to the watercolour paintings. There is also an ambiguous poignancy in a this comparison, especially given the complex relationship between photography and painting (and the arguable dominance of lens-based art in contemporary art theory and practice).

The difficulty of painting

When is a painting finished? Essentially the painting is ‘ready’ when it gives me sufficient pleasure to look at. I hope that this pleasure will then be communicated directly to viewer via the embodied experience described above. This is not necessarily an easy pleasure; in fact some of my paintings are decidedly ‘difficult on the eye’. In the final analysis, my aim is to achieve something of a fragile balance between order and entropy. So, when successful, the paintings signify (for me at least) something of the fragile, yet sublime, beauty of nature in all its forms.

Paul Evans 2012