EVELYNE BOREN
A Retrospective
Evelyne Boren was born in Germany at the outbreak of World War II. She recalls having been accidently left behind when her family rushed to a bomb shelter and looking out the window at bombs exploding around her home. She says, “I suppose subconsciously this is the reason I create cheerful paintings.”
She discovered vivid color underwater and on the islands of the Bahamas, where she was a stunt double in the James Bond films Thunderball and You Only Live Twice in the 1960s. She began painting in watercolor and later taught herself to paint with oil.
Her most recent oil and watercolor paintings of Mexico, New Mexico and Europe will be shown in an exhibition at Acosta Strong Fine Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, September 14 through 30. The exhibition coincides with the artist’s 80th birthday and the publication of the book Evelyne Boren—A Retrospective, published by Acosta Strong Publishing and co-written
by Suzanne Deats.
Boren simplifies the scenes that attract her. “Once I have decided what it is about the subject that I want to paint,” she says, “I will try to ignore the rest. That is not as easy as it sounds. In order to paint freely, you must know your subject very well. Then, forget the detail and put down only what is needed. More is not better. I want to keep it simple…It’s the quality that counts, not how much you can cram on to the canvas.”
She does a charcoal sketch to capture the lights and darks. As well as limiting the detail, she limits her palette. She says, “To express what I see I will choose up to six colors. This is the right amount to express the essence of what I am experiencing.”
Pilar, New Mexico, is nestled in the Rio Grande Gorge south of Taos. Its humble chapel, Nuestra Senora de los Dolores, is dwarfed by the walls of the gorge. It becomes a grand edifice in the sunlight of Boren’s nearly 4-foot-square painting, Spring Walk in Pilar. The thick impasto of oil paint applied with a palette knife captures not only the scale of the scene but the subtleties of light on the path and in the shadows of the flowering fruit tree. Light and shadow frame a mother and daughter in her Trees in San Ignacio. Both paintings are scenes near her studios in Santa Fe and in Sayulita, Mexico.