Artist Q & A: Jamie Evrard
Jamie Evrard, Recklessness and Grace. Oil on canvas, 36 x 60 inches.
1. Can you share any thoughts about your earliest draw to floral subjects and how your fascination has evolved over time?
I’m always influenced by the work environments I find myself in, so when I got a studio on Granville Island just a block from the market I began to paint still lifes -fruit and flowers mostly - that I bought at the market. In the early eighties I built a studio in my backyard and surrounded it with a garden that soon became as chaotic and crowded as my life.
2. How do the characteristics of your floral subjects influence your artistic approach and choice of medium?
Undisciplined and casually cared for gardens are my favourite and seem to provide the best inspiration for loose, rather wild paintings. I want people to be able to feel they can climb into the big paintings.
The artist's extensive palette.
3. Can you discuss how the local environment of Vancouver’s gardens influences your work and whether you find inspiration from any particular gardens or floral settings in the area?
VanDusen Gardens used to be a big inspiration but its beds have been reduced, tamed and organized along more conventional lines in the last few years. The delphinium beds, however, still retain their chaotic and exhuberant atmosphere, especially as they ripen. And dusk in the Queen Elizabeth Park rose garden is a magical time; the garden fills with golden light and locals and visitors alike speaking every language.
Lately I’ve have been spending more time in community gardens where people’s quirky plots often reveal their creators' eccentricities, and strange and unlikely arrangements of flowers and vegetables often appear together. Each gardener is creating his or her own personal Eden. Personal interventions into the natural landscape.
Jamie Evrard, Rose Garden at Sunset. Oil on paper, 25 x 25 inches.
4. The diaphanous dresses hanging in the garden are a relatively new addition to your garden images, now appearing in a second consecutive exhibition. Are they real, and if so, can you share how you discovered them and what drew you to them? What do they symbolize for you or mean to you?
When I first spotted the dresses in a community garden along the Arbutus corridor, I was bewitched by them and spent quite a bit of time photographing them in situ. Although it did seem unusual to see such lovely garments hanging outdoors and returning to nature by way of full and continuous exposure to the elements, they seemed to belong in that wildish garden plot surrounded by purple irises and green onions. I have since met the BC based textile artist Deirdre Phillips who created the ephemeral dress installation “Four Seasons” in her garden that I was so moved by. Since then, I have returned to that garden every year. Last fall, I returned to see the four dresses had transformed into one dress and learned that it has now moved with the artist to continue its journey in her new home garden.
Although I thought about the dresses often, I started to paint them only last summer when, for some reason I’m unsure of, they needed to come out in my paintings. I often don’t know why I am attracted to paint certain things until long after I stop working on them and I’m still not completely certain about why I’m drawn to these. But last summer my mother passed away and I suppose the dresses speak to a kind of lost beauty or the essence of a person that remains after they have gone... but in a way that is much more joyous than sad. And the mysterious white dresses are a great excuse to describe the quality of light they catch and emit.
Jamie Evrard, July. Oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches.
5. These paintings capture an air of late summer with a hint of the autumnal change. What does this transitional time of year symbolize for you, and how do you translate that into your artwork?
It seems to me that for something to be beautiful it must be in some way imperfect or even disturbing. In autumn plants begin to fail, to tilt, to fade, and it is this that I find the greatest challenge to describe. I suppose this is the crack where the light gets through.
-Jamie Evrard, 2024
