Breathe
Henri Matisse wrote, “I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.” And later, “Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.”
In his paintings of waterlilies for his exhibition Breathe at Gallery Henoch in New York, John Evans manipulates space as Matisse did. Painting, scraping down, sanding, glazing and repainting, he finishes with a painting that invites contemplation—quiet meditation.
Inspired by water gardens in Palm Beach, Florida, he has created a series of paintings that become less and less descriptive, the leaves and flowers becoming shapes in space barely suggesting depth as they dance across the surface of the canvas.
In Light in Later Season, there is reference to the physical reality of the pool with its concrete edges, reflections of nearby vegetation and the sky and only a suggestion of the depth of the water. Composing Dancing in Palm Beach, Evans “worked from my photographic material with the complexity of millions of elliptical forms. It synthesized itself into a flow, a choreography of large swirling patterns of clustered leaves. I had come up with the bones of what attracted me to the photographs and began to work on the paintings for this exhibition,” he says.
“In Infinity, the forms are distributed around the rectangle of the painting,” continues Evans. “There’s no reference to the edge of the pool, no body of water. It’s a tribute to a number of painters, especially Matisse, who created form and space without chiaroscuro. His study of Islamic art helped him flatten space while still building a volumetric space for the forms to exist in.”
In Earlier, he continues the clustering in “little groupings of elliptical forms that are ostensibly waterlilies sitting on the surface. I’m distilling more and more without losing any sense of the scene’s resonance. I’m stumbling into a new area of expressive radiance.” His distillation process results in ambiguous images from the point of view of one looking for realism. They are a restful composition of forms, color and open areas that invite a non-referential journey through time and space.
Matisse sought the same qualities in his own work.
“What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter—a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”
Evans invites us to slow down and to Breathe. The exhibition runs March 19 through April 11.