JAMIE EVRARD | FROM COAST TO GARDEN
Jamie Evrard | From Coast to Garden
September 10 - 24, 2022
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present new paintings in both oil and watercolour by Vancouver artist Jamie Evrard - timeless images celebrating the storybook beauty of BC’s coasts and gardens in the summertime. Evrard immerses the viewer in communion with the natural world, engaging all the senses as she invokes an evergreen-scented breeze and rustle of thick garden growth within her images. Quiet and intimate, each scene captures a sense of solitary contemplation, with a reverence for everyday simplicity. Her clever use of oil paint as watercolour on canvas, as well as her traditional watercolours on paper, impart a lightness of hand and sunlit transparency.
Artist statement:
Last fall, I spent a couple of weeks in a cabin near Ucluelet and one in Sooke, with the idea of hiking and taking photographs of the surrounding wilderness to paint from. Every day, my friend and I would go out for a walk in the morning, and then feel pulled home by all the ideas in our heads which we wanted to get into our sketchbooks. The previous year at home during Covid made whatever we saw appear extra brilliant and extra fantastical - we were overwhelmed by the beauty of BC coastlines, and eager to return to the cabin to record our impressions in our sketchbooks. We’d work until dark—seaside landscapes, forests, wild skies, water roiling, thrashy waves all came pouring out.
Last spring, I used many of the photos I had taken to make watercolours, thinking perhaps they could be used as a basis for oils. This, however, was more difficult than I had anticipated, and I went through much paint and canvas experimenting, trying to capture the lightness and transparency of watercolour with oils before I came up with anything I liked.
In July, I visited Van Dusen Gardens with a friend, and was completely captivated by the lushness of the delphinium bed. Returning home, I started a small, blue painting that night…. the flower paintings then took over my life completely and thus make up much of the show.
Summer’s abundant light makes painting such a joy. - Jamie Evrard 2022