Gregory Evans’ paintings come from somewhere between myth and streetlife, occult texts and early Dogtown’s skate and surf culture, Bosch, and the Germs, and that infinite void and whatever insists on crawling out of it. Artist Gregory Evans has been navigating that territory since the 1970s and shows no sign of stopping.
If you found your way here, you probably already felt something vibing with you, so what follows below is the longer answer to the shorter question of who made what and why.
STATEMENT
My work is narrative, flexible, rubbery, fluid. The images I paint are organic, surreal, psychedelic, and always folding back onto themselves, referring to themselves, refering to each other, referring to us, ourselves. Alongside painting, I study esoteric texts and global myth – these days not as much looking to them for their answers, but for the strange echoes they leave in their wake. I explore our stories looking for the unexpected, the not so easily seen, those stories that haven’t yet been told. It’s both these known and unknown stories, these worlds, that I paint.
A blank canvas grabs my attention immediately. It pulls on me, it dares me. A stretched, gessoed-white piece of woven cloth is a window for me, it’s a void, a turn in the road, a mirror of odd familiarity packaged with some strange and wonderful kind of madness.
IT’S AN OVERFLOWING EMPTINESS, A COPIOUS CORNUCOPIA, A BURSTING OF LIFE
The canvas is an abyss. It pulses and heaves – it displays, continually morphing – performing even. It’s is a place where all is possible, and nothing improbable. Anything can appear and nothing is predetermined. It’s the threshold between the unknowable and whatever is becoming – and it’s this becoming that’s important to me. It’s the bursting of life; a copious cornucopia. An overflowing emptiness.
Some artists find that void unnerving, the white of that canvas – the pressure caused by not knowing what will emerge. For me, that void is luminous, having a kind of fragmented clarity, a brilliance that shines like a diamond. I’m totally drawn to the process of translating abstract concepts, those unnameable forms, the proto-images that arise from nothingness, into something that can actually live in our visible world
ART
My work is a lyrical enigma, a cryptic tension, a meta-modern, meta-mischief. Its a view of that shadowy edge that lays somewhere off in the distance, behind the shadows. I test the boundaries of these strange worlds – I touch them. They test me and touch me in return. For me, it’s less creation than negotiation, witnessing a kind of birth in slow motion while a subject is formed into something cohesive. It’s like looking in a mirror and seeing an unexpected you, a you that you didn’t know, looking back at you.
THE VOID DOESN’T CARE – IT EMITS WITHOUT AGENDA OR JUDGMENT. BEING PAINTED IS THE LAST OF ITS CONCERNS
If something quickly passes me by, it goes on to do what it means to do. I’m not all that important – the void doesn’t care, it emits without agenda or judgment; being painted is the last of its concerns. The subjects I give form to, those I’ve interrupted, can suddenly be willing subjects to be painted, and time can be short for that kind of thing – posing for sittings can be a restless thing for entities on the go.
Mine is an involvement with what is emitted from this source which by nature is quite surreal in its oscillating rhythms. It’s metamodernism in a pop-surreal package.
I work across many mediums and surfaces, though oils on canvas remain the core of my practice. My colors are bold, my approach a guided spontaneity – its my response to what we don’t noramlly see in life as we know it. My work is always reaching, always questioning, probing to find a balance between what is imagined and what is real enough to touch, only to find they’re one, and the same.
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BIOGRAPHY
Artist Gregory Evans
Born in 1957 in Wimpole Park, Cambridgeshire, England, Gregory Evans cut his teeth in the 1960s and 1970s on the beaches and beach ghetto communities of south Santa Monica, Ocean Park, and Venice in Los Angeles, the specific area called Dogtown – deep inside the hippie, surfing, and skateboarding revolutions of the time. The punk era had him running a fanzine, DJing and promoting live bands in a San Diego punk bar, and playing bass in a band once compared with LA’s own Germs. His essays about art have been published by industry journals.
GREGORY FOUND HIS WAY SLOWLY INTO FINE ARTS, TAKING A VERY LONG JOURNEY OVER A VERY SHORT BRIDGE THAT CONNECTS COMIX TO FINE ART
Trained in graphic design and commercial art, Gregory found his way slowly into fine arts, where he is self-taught, finding it to be a very long journey over a very short bridge that connects comix and fine art. He currently lives and works in the Brittany region of northwest France. His paintings are held by private collectors in America and Europe.
His influences span Goya, Cézanne, Schiele, Bacon, the Mannerists, Bosch and Bruegel the Elder, the post-impressionists, the German expressionists, and the era-specific San Francisco rock poster and proto-metamodern, lowbrow, pop-surreal, underground comix artists, most specifically Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin, of the late 60s and the 1970s.
Evans also publishes his work in print independently under the Buried with all his Teeth banner: the newsletter, the voice in print, and the BwahT Printshop.
