CAROL EVANS

Watercolour paint is a natural medium for me. It complements and enhances the beauty of this coastal panorama. This region is, after all, a damp, misty part of the world a lot of the time. Water hangs in great silken sheets of fog across mountains and inlets. It ripples and reflects along the shore. The wet, delicate, and raw subtleties of watercolour washes are ideal for conveying the gradation of light within clouds or a summer haze, perfect for suggesting shapes and forms barely visible in shrouded mist or streaking rain. It has a characteristic fresh, organic quality that easily gives the impression of trees and plants, and of rock formations and their textures. It is quick and spontaneous, and has a simplicity to it, requiring few tools. It has a wild quality and although the water can be somewhat controlled, it cannot quite be tamed.

The first impression is always sunlight, the primary concern of everything I paint. No matter what the subject, my process of painting is entirely influenced by light: its direction, the shadows it creates, its honey glow causing everything to hover on a cushion of warm air. Light penetrates things, revealing inner qualities and colours, like the veins in a leaf or the translucence of a shell. It creates halos around them. It makes things shine and flash and reach out to you, come alive. It rings out like sound echoing here and there off everything, filling a place with its reflected glow like a visual symphony. It has a divine loveliness to it. It appears without any human hand causing it to appear. It is just there and a scene is blessed with its rays. My work is to reflect it in my painting.

Many of Carol Evans watercolours portray British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest on the beautiful and rugged pacific shores on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Her ability to create intensity of colour in the watercolour medium and her attention to the subtleties of light are trademarks of her increasingly popular work.

Since 1981 Carol has held 15 very successful one-woman exhibitions in a variety of places; Vancouver, Salt Spring Island, Gabriola Island and Nanaimo. She was invited to participate in a group exhibition by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, “The Real West Coast” where she was honoured to have her paintings shown along side the work of fellow west coast artists.

She is currently working on new paintings of places along the BC coast that have caught her interest in sharing these sights with you.