Arts

The son of a minister, Evans grew up in the South, spending time in Virginia and North Carolina. He’s amiable in a diffident way, and seems slightly embarrassed by the attention of a journalist. I get the impression he would much rather be painting than talking about painting.

Though I have known Evans’ work for many years and admired its cheerful, naïve quality and simple themes, I had no concept of his painting process, which is both unusual and complex, involving a whole other “painting” underneath the finished image. To explain it, Evans shows me an artist’s book he made for his son that describes his process using Thurber-like cartoons, collage and pithy Wolf Kahn quotes. On a whim, he took the book to his most recent show and discovered unexpected PR benefits: His sales went up. He thinks this is because once people understand his process, they appreciate the work all the more.

As the book explains, Evans starts a painting by covering the canvas with any leftover paint he has lying around (he uses acrylic paint, which gives him bright, flat color). He sometimes covers the canvas with words; sometimes he paints an elaborate “crazy quilt” of color. These initial efforts have no real significance and bear absolutely no resemblance to the finished work; they’re purely random doodles. But they are important, functioning as a kind of loosening up exercise and laying the foundation of a surface that will be built up and rubbed, scratched or partially sanded away to produce the richly textured quality that Evans is known for. In some cases, he will further break up the surfaces by using collage or by dividing the paintings into diptychs and triptychs.

Evans tries not to intellectualize the painting process. He keeps his standards high, but he’s not afraid to produce a bad painting: If worse comes to worse, he says, he can always paint over it. This attitude keeps him loose and his production fluid. But he does set himself a rigid schedule, devoting 100 hours per month to painting.