Leef Evans
Bio
As a boy I read black scripture in creosol on the pillars beneath the truck route bridge over Scott creek. I remember crayfish, raccoons and salmon, and old man McPhail’s three-legged cat looking for voles.
As a young man I towered over the shadow of my own church and dented steel doors in the infirmary. I read in Faulkner’s bed and did glib dumb-shows with what I thought were sock-puppets.
Older older older my tendons frayed and small bits of jesus wept thru my skin. I read what I wrote in green ball-point and signed it left-handed.
The creosol tells more than purple text. The word is not the sound it makes. There is no meme or metaphor in paint. This relates to you as much of me as anything.
As a boy I read black scripture in creosol on the pillars beneath the truck route bridge over Scott creek. I remember crayfish, raccoons and salmon, and old man McPhail’s three-legged cat looking for voles.
As a young man I towered over the shadow of my own church and dented steel doors in the infirmary. I read in Faulkner’s bed and did glib dumb-shows with what I thought were sock-puppets.
Older older older my tendons frayed and small bits of jesus wept thru my skin. I read what I wrote in green ball-point and signed it left-handed.
The creosol tells more than purple text. The word is not the sound it makes. There is no meme or metaphor in paint. This relates to you as much of me as anything.
7 Dunbar
36" x 24"
Acrylic on panel
$500
36" x 24"
Acrylic on panel
$500
Artist Statement
Magical Realism embraces the Absurd and the Mundane, treating each as both everyday and spectacle. Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes of traveling wonders rife with flying carpets, fallen angels, heartbeats that have ran out of numbers and topaz teeth. And yet these things are often not as glorious or coveted as a brick of ice or fresh washed linen. The glorious is in the everyday. The most beautiful things are nestled in the most banal of landscapes. They need only to be rooted out and shown.
There is a therapy in the landscape. There is a simplicity in the landscape. I live in Vancouver so I paint Vancouver. The story writes itself. The excessive image, the subtle image merge in all things and the little world portrayed is beholden to nothing but the unconscious miracle of its own composition.
I paint to achieve therapeutic catharsis. The process is everything. The finished work is almost incidental. The tangible act of painting is like a rite, a rosary of brushstrokes and other applications, an almost-sacred meditation on the colour and form in front of me. And when a painting is done there is a small measure of peace afforded me, a peace that is unavailable to me in almost anything else I do. This peace is unique to the physical act of painting and it is beautiful. It is also short. It is illusory and unsubstantial (insomuch as it does not linger), and when it fades, and it always does, I am compelled to begin another work. This perpetual chase of small harmonies is both delightful and exhaustive. I have been known to paint thirty finished works in six weeks, whereupon I am often a wreck and in need of a sabbatical from the pursuit of peace. However, it is never long before I am fingering my brushes like a nun’s beads and I am back at my cans of paint.
These rites - persistent and gritty, often tiresome, often hard - produce the odd moment, the odd product of splendour. I think this is in keeping with notions of Magic Realism where the wonder of the world is not found in alabaster pyramids or spires of steel, but rather, in the back alleys of the lesser places where the sun shines when we’re not paying attention.
Magical Realism embraces the Absurd and the Mundane, treating each as both everyday and spectacle. Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes of traveling wonders rife with flying carpets, fallen angels, heartbeats that have ran out of numbers and topaz teeth. And yet these things are often not as glorious or coveted as a brick of ice or fresh washed linen. The glorious is in the everyday. The most beautiful things are nestled in the most banal of landscapes. They need only to be rooted out and shown.
There is a therapy in the landscape. There is a simplicity in the landscape. I live in Vancouver so I paint Vancouver. The story writes itself. The excessive image, the subtle image merge in all things and the little world portrayed is beholden to nothing but the unconscious miracle of its own composition.
I paint to achieve therapeutic catharsis. The process is everything. The finished work is almost incidental. The tangible act of painting is like a rite, a rosary of brushstrokes and other applications, an almost-sacred meditation on the colour and form in front of me. And when a painting is done there is a small measure of peace afforded me, a peace that is unavailable to me in almost anything else I do. This peace is unique to the physical act of painting and it is beautiful. It is also short. It is illusory and unsubstantial (insomuch as it does not linger), and when it fades, and it always does, I am compelled to begin another work. This perpetual chase of small harmonies is both delightful and exhaustive. I have been known to paint thirty finished works in six weeks, whereupon I am often a wreck and in need of a sabbatical from the pursuit of peace. However, it is never long before I am fingering my brushes like a nun’s beads and I am back at my cans of paint.
These rites - persistent and gritty, often tiresome, often hard - produce the odd moment, the odd product of splendour. I think this is in keeping with notions of Magic Realism where the wonder of the world is not found in alabaster pyramids or spires of steel, but rather, in the back alleys of the lesser places where the sun shines when we’re not paying attention.
Orange Bicycle no. 2
Acrylic on Panel
36" x 24"
$500
Acrylic on Panel
36" x 24"
$500
Bollards & Barricade
Mixed Media on canvas
48 x 36"
$1000
Mixed Media on canvas
48 x 36"
$1000
Contact Information for Leef Evans
604 313-8879
604 313-8879
Comments? Use our Guestbook
Photos by Rachel Warick & Leef Evans