Jamie Evrard | Of Innocence and Experience
Jamie Evrard | Of Innocence and Experience
June 1-15, 2019
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 1, 2019, 2-4 PM
Of Innocence and Experience — the latest exhibition by floral painter Jamie Evrard — adopts its title from the collected poems of William Blake. Like Blake, Evrard's stylistic language is distinctly one of powerful and concise lyricism. The contrary states of "innocence" and "experience" named in Blake's famed work speaks to both the artist's process as well as to the physical qualities and changing nature of her floral subject.
Speaking on her practice, the artist describes the daily undertaking of painting and the ways in which her compositions, rife with diaphanous brushwork, delicate accents, and high colour washes, come together:
Oftentimes, Evrard’s works are hard-won marvels — borne of five-o’clock starts, flipped canvasses and painted over false starts — which gradually transform into richly layered records of the time spent in her studio and visual testaments to the artist’s creative experience.
On rarer occasion, by her own admission, Evrard’s approach towards the blank canvas takes on a guileless openness and intuitive certainty, which manifests in striking directness, unencumbered looseness, and warm familiarity in the artist’s handling of the oil medium.
As Evrard embraces her concurrent approaches to painting, so too does she insist on the varied forms of her subject matter, rejecting the pristine beauty of perfect blooms in favor of tentative buds, bruised petals, and overblown blossoms, in a dedicated exploration and fervent celebration of innocence and experience.