Edward Evans

An American abstract painter who studied at the University of Minnesota and has had a long and successful career in art education, serving as Professor of Art at Southwest State University, Marshall, Minnesota from 1969 to 2002.  His work can be found in many American corporate collections and he has been given solo shows in dozens of museums in the States. His work is represented in Queens Museum of Art, New York.

Abstract Illusionism, Conceptual, Contemporary. Edward Evans exhibited in Galleries & Museums around the world, has a significant international collector base. Born and educated in Minnesota where he earned MFA, MA, and BS degrees, he was a Professor Emeritus of Art at Southwest Minnesota State University; in addition to teaching painting and drawing, he founded the university art gallery and led its development to museum status. In 2002, Edward moved to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, for closer proximity to the New York City art scene and established his working studio in the mountains. Evans continues to serve as the director of the Southwest Minnesota State University Art Museum. Evan’s airbrush painting style is Hyper-realism combines with the passion for abstraction, spontaneity, and dynamic compositions, encouraging visual movement across the surface and into and back out of allusory shadows and depth. In principle, Evans technique relates to old master glazing techniques, except that he sprays the transparent layers of paint. Our eyes/brains visually mix paint layers and cause us to see illusionary surfaces of raised letters, creases, folds, colors, and light. Being able to see all the way through to the bottom layer of white causes even the blacks to glow.

“...The degree of illusion [Evans] achieves through his mastery of airbrush techniques is unlike anything I have seen. Airbrush has always been sneered at by fine artists as being a tool for lowly illustration. Score one for Evans for using it to invent a style both lush and stark. His subject is Chinese text. He writes about his mental processes involved in the art making and creates optically baffling renderings of the texts seemingly inscribed into fluttering or crumpled tablets, papers or cloth. He invents the imagery purely from his imagination. Conceptually, it is most intriguing that he is not at all interested in calligraphy. The characters are copied from the rigid mechanical fonts of his translation program. These ironies create layers of contradicting ingenuity that adds up to more than meets the eye.” — Christopher Chambers, NY Arts Magazine.