My current body of work seeks to answer the question, How do I create feeling with simple shape, texture, and color? Everything in my studio practice right now is growing directly out of that question. This work is unapologetically flawed, warm, and tactile. The collages are meant to be a study of the relationship between restraint and the compulsion to fill space. They are also meant to remind us of our humanity. Utilizing old, deconstructed textiles and leaving hints of underpainting, I invite the viewer to fall in love with imperfection.

 Themes that run throughout Evans’s work are fear, faith, doubt, and death. Most of the works come from his personal experiences as intertwined with bits and pieces of culture (film, literature, paintings), and take a somewhat subliminal approach in their picturing. Things Evans ask himself are, Who am I, where have I come from, what am I doing with this brush in my hand, what am I afraid of, what was that feeling, what was that place and is it more real to me now that I have painted it?

 The Arrested Series paintings focus on criminal justice reform, substance abuse, homelessness, mental illness, and criminal activity. The images of individuals are found online in public police blotter websites. The filter of the mugshot allows me to explore the individual’s experiences and emotions at the moment the image was captured.

 A teenager stands in front of a fallen tree, which although damaged has managed to bloom. The girl’s posture holds clues about her emotional state. The rough brushstrokes and scratched surface both contradict and complement the quiet emotional tone, striking a precarious balance. Somewhere between a social media snapshot, landscape painting, religious iconography, and film still, the subject matter becomes death, loss, grief, perseverance, courage, and hope.

 My recent paintings are narrative cityscapes, fixating on snapshots of blighted neighborhoods in a fictional coastal city based largely on New Orleans. These areas are within view of the bright and bustling downtown, yet they are literally sunken and forgotten, their streets quietly drowning beneath a stagnant and perpetual flood. Houses and backyards are swallowed whole by hungry sinkholes, while lone pedestrians get stoned under street lights darkened by an ever-expanding canopy of verdant leaves.

 Impromptu photographs are the most useful beginnings for my paintings; it is important that the photographic image be generated from a snapshot from my daily routine. The images that arrive on my doorstep (versus ones that may have been predetermined) are what I instinctively trust most.

Emotional distance in imagery is something that I strongly identify with.

 My work considers painting as a physical and material site for the mediation of environmental space and experience. The surfaces of the paintings often appear worn and weathered, implying a history of physical change. Stained, sewn, and often not straight, the canvases stretch and sometimes hang without supports, enacting an imperfect or slanted relationship to the modernist use of the Cartesian grid and the idealized horizon line of landscape painting’s history.

 After thirty years as a studio artist, I’ve pivoted to making art in public in an attempt to work in a way that is visible and meaningful, both politically and aesthetically. I make onsite drawing essays that meditate on place, history, ecology, and community dynamics. For each project I select a site that is hyperlocal but underexamined. A fine starting point is any site that embodies a personal locus of assumption and ignorance. I’ve painted at court, at polling locations during the last few elections, at my local gas station, a soup kitchen, a car wash, a nightclub . . .

 Throughout my career I have been influenced by anachronistic images of fashion and personal objects. My paintings and needlepoint works recontextualize outmoded styles and give them new meanings. I paint images of often headless people, their personal objects and interior spaces that indicate complex psychological and social relationships with one another. Without the head, the viewer sees the clothed body not as a portrait but as a collection of objects, and patterns. I am interested in the surreal connection between realistic subject matter and flat repetitive pattern.

 My artwork examines the impermanence and fragility of the natural world and the objects within it. Using my own imagery, I create landscape paintings that capture a universally held notion of what an idyllic landscape is or should be. While I am interested in portraying an ideal space, it is also important that viewers can see that the place I am depicting does not exist in our world. In order to heighten this sense of a manufactured construction of place, I intentionally deconstruct and fracture elements of the landscape.