Nancy Evans

My paintings start with pouring paint on canvas. Usually I have a color in mind, and a simple composition. The Moon paintings are moody with dark, murky colors and a sense of place related to American transcendental painting and sympathetic to the early modernist work of Arthur Dove and Charles Burchfield. The paintings have compositionally deep space described by layers and layers of watery paint, and it is the suggestibility of material, the tendency to mimic natural processes, that results in artworks that are expressionistic rather than realistic or idealized. I am obsessed with color, and tend to use a very muted, desaturated palette that, when properly tuned, can result in a significant atmospheric effect. As an artist—practicing now for forty years—I have mostly worked within abstraction but in the Moon paintings I was specifically motivated to paint something “romantic.” Nature lent a helping hand with the stunning supermoons we’ve been observing over the last several years, a nighttime event that allows us moments of contemplation even in the big city.