Caroline Evans — Art Imitates Life

Caroline Evans — Art Imitates Life - theHumm December 2020

By Sally Hansen

Art… and Soul

Happy endings are always satisfying, and particularly welcome at this time of year when we’re forced to reinvent our Christmas holidays. Quite by chance we discovered that our featured artist this month is enjoying a storybook denouement to a peripatetic life filled with adventure and challenge. Oil painter and batik artist Caroline Evans is loving every minute of her idyllic life on ten acres of wooded countryside near Perth. Her art career has been as non-linear as her location, and it too has bloomed anew.

Her primary medium is oil paints and her favourite subject is landscapes. She is acutely conscious of time and place. Working from photographs that evoke a memory or an emotion, her beautiful oil paintings reflect her continuing love for and interest in geomorphology — the science of landforms that studies their origin, evolution, form, and distribution across the physical landscape. She describes her paintings as “…memories of places I’ve lived… I lived close to the sea for half of my life and I started painting big happy places. I had to capture on canvas what was so special about that particular place.”

Both her education and her extensive travels as a military wife continue to shape her art. After an honours degree in geography at university she earned teaching qualifications at Bristol and then a professional Certificate in Ecology and Conservation at the University of London. She is qualified to work on a nature reserve in England, and now is using her knowledge and love of nature to rewild her new country home.

On her website at Studiobythetay.com Caroline writes, “I am conscious of time — time of day, weather, season, history, prehistory, and geological processes. I am conscious of place — immediate location, water pattern, vegetation, human usage and reputation, animal usage, region, continent, latitude, longitude, altitude, and gravity. I try and express these in my painting. In a way, my paintings are illustrations, teaching tools maybe. I hope they help people appreciate not only the ‘beauty’ they find around them, but also the workings of Nature and Humankind that have gone into the making of that view.”

Like her life, her art also takes unexpected forays into new adventures. Evans has recently achieved the rank of “master” in batik classes and now assists in teaching others the time-honoured art of decorating cloth using wax and dyes. Her batiks are spontaneous, playful and whimsical. She finds that the process itself inspires creativity and broadens her artistic horizons. Her medium of choice when she has strong emotions to deal with is acrylic paint for its speed and ease of completion.

Art Imitates Life Imitates Art

Five years ago, Evans moved into what she expects to be her permanent home — a bungalow on land bordered on one end by the Tay River, with a woodland that is a wildlife corridor populated by a wide variety of animals. The peace and space are ideal for her husband Michael who is recovering from PTSD and physical injuries as a result of two military stints in Afghanistan and several other operational deployments. He is renovating the house; she is embracing her full-time art career, and they are preserving their natural habitat and living more lightly on the planet.

For Caroline, her new home is the perfect resolution to “all those years of having to adapt to places chosen for us.” Of English and Welsh descent, she was born in Hong Kong and educated in London and Bristol. She was working for the British Service Children School Board teaching military kids in Cyprus when she met a Canadian United Nations peacekeeper.

Her peripatetic adventure through life and careers seems to have been foreordained. She remembers deciding that she wanted to be an artist on her first day of pre-school. Inheritance of her grandfather’s pochade box (a self-contained portable studio, designed to carry all the basic necessities to paint on location) at the age of ten furthered her intent, but her test scores streamed her into the academic program and Latin replaced art classes.

She immigrated to Canada with three months in which to get married, and embarked on the itinerant life of the military. The couple had postings in London (Ontario this time), Québec City, Montréal, then to Germany for three years, and brought two sons back to Canada where they lived in Brantford for two years, one year in Borden, spent three years at Petawawa, and then ten years in Ottawa. In 2009 their sons remained in school in Ottawa during their parents’ four-year posting in Louisiana. Caroline joined an oil painting group and had an epiphany. She decided she wasn’t going to teach special needs children anymore; she was “old enough that a career change was totally legitimate.”

She signed up for oil painting classes and started painting fulltime. A short time later her painting group asked her to be their teacher. She signed up for more lessons for herself, and for four years she thrived as an artist and an instructor and put out a 16-page community newspaper. Following her husband’s return from Afghanistan they spent two years in North York and started looking for a quieter, more peaceful place to live. Their home near Perth fits the bill perfectly and they are close to their sons in Ottawa.

Evans may have reached her desired geographic destination, but her repertoire of artistic interests and accomplishments continues to expand. She is now a member of both the Rideau Lakes Artists Association and the Manotick Art Association, participating in their shows and volunteering in a number of capacities. She is a founding member of Art Works! Perth, and with fellow Batik artist and mentor Jenn Raby, has started Perth Visual Voice Development. The project aims to make art-making more accessible to local people.

Art Unconfined at Strévé

Until January 15 you can drop in at 64 Gore St. E. in Perth to enjoy paintings and batiks by Caroline Evans and Jenn Raby, complemented by the beautiful painted furniture of Donna McPhail. The artworks are on display at the Strévé Design Art Gallery in the shop’s second-floor mezzanine loft. The ground floor display of fashions by gallery owner Cheryl Straby is an added inducement to don your mask and admire the works of these four talented local artists. Online viewing and shopping options are noted on the back of Caroline’s Artist Trading Card at the top of this page.

Artist Trading Card

What Will 2021 Bring? - theHumm December 2020

By Kris Riendeau

Howdy Humm readers! As we may have perhaps already mentioned, it’s been an interesting year to be an “arts & events” paper. Interesting, challenging, but ultimately rewarding and pretty darn hummbling as well, thanks to the uplifting support we have received from so many people.

At this time last year we were putting the final touches on an issue that was full of fabulous events happening all over the Valley, and at the same time preparing for a fun event of our own —the premiere of Who Stole Christmas from Mississippi Mills? — written by Rob Riendeau and directed by yours truly.......

Caroline Evans — Art Imitates Life - theHumm December 2020