I happened to be visiting a friend yesterday, when she asked for some design advice. We needed to move some accessories and art around in her lovely home. Two such pieces that we moved were amazing paintings by her cousin Julie Evans! I loved them, and wanted to know more about Julie and her latest works of art. Luckily, my friend Susan made a phone call and before I knew it I was allowed to blog about this extremely talented artist!! Julie Evans is a New York City based artist, who obtained herMFA from Brooklyn College and her BFA from Syracuse University. She has beenspending time in India on a regular basis since 1997, including eight months ona Fulbright Scholarship to research Indian miniature paintings. Thesetraditional paintings, along with India's rich visual culture have been acontinuing source of inspiration for Evans' work for the past 13 years. Usingmany of the traditional materials and techniques of Indian miniatures andborrowing from their traditional representations of nature, Evans createsdetailed, fluid works that combine Eastern, historical, figurative paintingwith Western Contemporary Abstraction. She explores the role ornamentationplays in both Indian life and art, and how scale, fine detail, and process playinto that role. one of her projects, Cowdust, is a series of eightcollaborative paintings on paper. It is the culmination of Evans' work relatedto Indian miniatures, and was done in Jaipur, India, with Ajay Sharma - arecognized master of miniature painting and close friend of Evans' for manyyears. For Cowdust, Evans and Sharma worked together taking turns painting on eachpiece in response to the other's addition. Working in this way, they arrived atpaths they never would have found on their own, given their very differentcultures, painting practices, and temperaments. This led to many fortuitous, aswell as humorous visual collisions in the work, which Evans and Sharma embracedand emphasized, and which ultimately helped define the works themselves. As aresult, Evans and Sharma found ways to bridge gaps and fuse opposites in aseries of distinctive works that cross time, space and place.
Acrylic,gouache, coloured pencil, mineral and lac pigments on paper are the ingredientsof recent work by New York-based Julie Evans and Indian miniaturist Ajay Sharma. Thank you Julie Evans!
PRONOUNCED: on rud ah lean-uss onsewell lean-onn shay on kreeMEANING: What fills the eye fills the heart!!A little Gaelic for your weekend!!!
