Jamie Evrard | Time's Garden
September 14-28, 2024
Main Level | 3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday September 14, 2-4pm
Artist in Attendance
Artist Talk & Tour Saturday September 14, 2:15 - 2:30pm
Bau-Xi Gallery is proud to present atmospheric and immersive new paintings on both canvas and paper by established Vancouver-based artist Jamie Evrard. In addition to Evrard's signature floral imagery, her exhibition also features five paintings of the enigmatic dresses from the garden art installation “Four Seasons” by BC based textile artist Deirdre Phillips.
Evrard’s floral fascination has spanned virtually her entire career, continually driven by flowers’ contrasting qualities of unapologetic boldness, fragility and ephemerality. Whether focusing on a single blossom or celebrating a chaotic profusion of garden blooms, Evrard adeptly captures their shapes, lines and personalities with light and soft yet decisive strokes. Embracing a slightly deeper and richer palette for her sensitive observances of Vancouver's gardens and ponds and the quiet curiosities they harbour, the artist imbues her lush subjects with an air of late summer – still in full and glorious bloom, with a hint of the autumnal change to come.
Jamie Evrard has had over 75 solo exhibitions across the US and Canada and has been featured in over 65 group exhibitions since 1970.
Artist Statement:
It’s a Tuesday morning in mid August and I’m supposed to be writing the dread Artist’s Statement. Instead, I’m out on the deck watching bees busy randomly attacking my sunflowers, flitting from one to the next and sometimes back again. They’re in a hurry, and they have no game plan other than to gather as much nectar and pollen as possible.
I can relate. All winter when the bees were asleep, I might as well have been too. I painted but the light was too dim, and I had trouble making decisions and believing in my choices. A few starts, lots of destruction and restarts.
Eventually spring arrived, then summer, bringing with them the light. Almost delirious with joy and, finally, energy, I culled most of the remaining winter paintings and returned to my studio. I started a big painting of artichoke plants, then painted over them in peonies, then roses, then abandoned the unconcluded work and started over. Though ideas grew as rapidly as my new garden plants, they often became unwieldy and obstinate.
As summer progressed and my deadline approached, I began to do the bee thing, buzzing around to seven or eight new canvases more or less at random, working on each one in turn. I felt I could now make the decisions I needed to coax the paintings in the right direction. The studio looked like a house of cards, or maybe the way an overly abundant garden must look to a bee. Where to go first and what to do next!
When the days are bright I work this way - everything at once, very intuitive, and with one painting feeding the next. Many of these paintings have long stories behind them, layers upon layers of ideas that once veered off track or onto tangents before I finally righted them. Cannibalizing a big painting with large brushes is, in fact, one of the great joys of painting.
Delphiniums continue to fascinate me, the way they bend and drape in beautiful rhythms when they are at their ripest. Excuses for layers and layers of blues and purples. And I love the way a painting of water can take off in a completely unexpected way.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I need to stop writing and go paint.
-Jamie Evrard, 2024
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