Jil Evans

I make abstract paintings originating in observation. I have learned to trust what I find visually enthralling in the world has deep connections with questions I have about how we experience and inhabit the world. Growing up between Gary, Indiana and Chicago, Illinois, travel between these two cities along the southern shore of Lake Michigan shaped the dialectic at the core of what I have brought to my exploration of abstraction: the miles of steel and oil industry lighting up the sky with flaming towers, through which one can glimpse the spaciousness and unbroken horizon of the Great Lake. I am drawn to movement of light, reflections on water disordered by what lies underneath, and the premonition of metamorphosis perceptible in natural structures. In the way that sound, rhythm, and breath build compression and express feeling in a lyric poem, I use contrasting color, contrasting spatial depths, and a wide range of marks, gestures, and the physicality of paint- from sheer washes to thick impasto - to suggest the way intimacy, alienation, struggle, and freedom exist in the psyche in a constant state of flux. In painting, the power of gestural line leads me to engage with the complex, exuberant paintings of Italian Baroque painters...

MFA Stanford University, Stanford, CA USA
MA University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA USA
BFA Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI USA

The Heart's Bright and Dark Light
St. Catherine's University, The Catherine G. Murphy Gallery, April 18-May 24, 2020
http://gallery.stkate.edu/exhibitions/the-hearts-bright-and-dark-light
Short Bio:
Jil Evans is a painter and writer who has exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally, including Minnesota, Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., Paris and Rome. Her work is in many private and public collections including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Walker Art Center. She has received a Jerome Foundation Grant, Arts Midwest/ National Endowment for the Arts award, two Minnesota State Arts Board grants, the Pew Grant to study and paint in Italy and residencies at the American Academy in Rome and Atlantic Center for the Arts.
She is one of four Minnesota painters featured in Kristin Lowe’s documentary film Painting the Place Between that premiered at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, MN.

Her publications include: The Image in Mind; Theism, Naturalism and the Imagination. Co-authored with Charles Taliaferro. London: Continuum Press, 2011, Turning Images in Philosophy, Science, and Religion; A New Book of Nature. Co-edited with Charles Taliaferro. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, “Representations,” Chapter 20...