Jil Evans

I am a visual artist who works with abstraction in painting to explore the relationship between touch and emotion, collapse and recovery; sensual relationships that relate to our longing to be at home in the world and with ourselves. Several years ago, walking through a city park in Oxford, England, I came underneath a beech tree on the path whose branches formed a canopy overhead. I felt a shift in my body immediately, a sudden sense of protection from the tree’s branches, combined with a sense of strength as I still had 360-degree vision of everything around me. I became interested in how different kinds of spaces and atmospheres affected how connected or disconnected I felt in an environment. Since that day, I have been developing a language in abstraction to create images that give form to this relationship between an inner life and the physical experiences of the natural world and the dynamics of light.

In the Diver and Crack Dawn series of oil paintings, I combined observations of flooded Minnesota rivers filled with organic debris and surface reflections to create narratives of dialectic tensions between force and repose. Torqued perspectives create different points of entry into the composition. Structures fly apart or gather, forms somersault from one space to another, spaces emerge over time for the viewer to rest in.