Artist Statement

I paint the hour before weather changes. On the Gulf that hour is long and slow; inland it can pass in four minutes, which is roughly how long a good plein air passage takes if you have already mixed your greys.

My work moves between direct observation and abstraction, and I have stopped treating those as separate practices. A marsh painted on location in one sitting and a studio panel scraped back eleven times are asking the same question: how little information does a viewer need before the eye finishes the picture on its own?

I work primarily in oil, often with cold wax medium on birch panel, and I keep a limited palette — titanium white, yellow ochre, cadmium red light, ultramarine, viridian, and a warm black I mix rather than buy. The restriction is not discipline for its own sake. It is what makes a group of paintings hang together as one voice.

Portraits and commissions come from the same place. I am not after likeness alone; I am after the specific light a person keeps around them.

Cheryl Evans