A Visceral Vitality

A Visceral Vitality

Top row (l. to r.) Fear, Opposition, Anger
Middle row: Loss (1.), Vader, Loss
Bottom row: Hate, Betrayal, Suffering

Clockwise from top left: Air, Fire, Water, Earth

Bowie

Treebeard (self portrait)

By Tom Wachunas 

  “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

  “There comes a time when the painting is no longer about likeness, but about memory, emotion, and expression.” -Scott Alan Evans 

EXHIBIT: VISAGE – new portraits by Scott Alan Evans, at The Hub Art Factory, 336 6th Street NW, downtown Canton.  NOTE: There are two remaining dates for viewing this exhibit: Open Studio night on Tuesday, June 14, 7:30 p.m. - 10:00 p.m., and Closing night, Friday June 17, starting at 5:00 p.m. 

 What do you consider to be an excellent painted portrait? What impresses you, enthralls you, pulls you in? Is it a perfectly executed physiognomy, an astonishing “likeness”? Is it the skillfully refined lineaments of mesmerizing mien or dignified deportment? Flawless tromp l’oeil technique? 

   You’ll find nothing of that ilk here. The brush that Scott Alan Evans wields isn’t a magic wand. He doesn’t conjure fool-the-eye illusions. His representational methodology isn’t one of micro-managed naturalism. It is on the other hand a substantially pared-down, albeit expressive sort of boldly colored realism. 

    Evans never lets us lose sight of the materiality of (acrylic) paint itself: viscous, tactile, moveable, at once liquid and solid, thick and thin. Paint as a primal conduit for channeling the energy of the artist’s gestural hand – the hand that can invest a face, whether still living, passed, or fictional, with a visceral life of its own.

 For as much as we might approach these portraits with any number of aesthetic predispositions or expectations, they approach us. Unfussy, honest and disarming, they are purely… present. Some might call Evans’ raw, simple style naïve. I call it brave.