Jamie Evrard: Things Residual

For her new solo exhibition What Remains, Vancouver based artist Jamie Evrard eloquently ruminates on the evolution of her approach to painting and the reason for her continual return to floral subject matter, referencing thoughtfully selected passages of poetry from the early 20th century for their precisely distilled descriptions of the artistic practice.

What Remains opens at Bau-Xi Vancouver's Main Level Gallery on September 12 and runs through September 26, 2026.

THINGS RESIDUAL
by Jamie Evrard

One of my favourite poems speaks eloquently of the rather haphazard way a work of art can come together:

See over there
A created splendour
Made by one individual 
From things residual.
-From The Self-Slaved by Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh

My paintings have always drawn from observation of and inspiration from nature: there is nothing I like better than to draw outside in my own yard, in another garden or in a forest. This year my “things residual” have all been close to home - the everyday subjects I painted were whatever was at hand, mostly ordinary flowers from my garden, VanDusen Gardens or even from my neighbourhood Safeway.

Jamie Evrard, Armory Bouquet. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches


I don’t think of flowers as just flowers, but rather as the most fertile jumping-off places for my imagination: slashes of light on the leaves, silky petals gathered gently together at the centre, their graceful forms waving in the breeze, and the deepening colours of a fading blossom lead me into colour and abstraction. 

Jamie Evrard, Afterglow. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches


Every painting contains its own history, carrying the traces of all thoughts and decisions made during its creation, and their resulting brush marks. Back when I started painting flowers, I’d buy a bouquet at the farmers’ market and take it home, put it on my studio windowsill, and paint it - I was content to record what I saw, which seemed like magic. However, eventually that no longer felt like enough for me. I remember once, years ago, I had to leave a big birthday party early to head quickly home, panicked to paint the hollyhocks that were wilting on my windowsill.

Now, I rely more on memory and on whatever the composition calls for colour- and shape-wise. These days, soon after I begin a painting from a visual reference, the work usually becomes a discussion or even a battle between me, the paint and the canvas, the original reference almost left behind as I work more abstractly trying to convey the essence of the image that excited me in the first place. 

Jamie Evrard, Summer Baroque. Oil on canvas, 23.75 x 72 inches

I love the way the poet T.S. Eliot describes in Four Quartets these attempts at conveying how one sees:

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.

I paint in a spirit of exploration rather than from habit – this makes the work feels riskier and more dangerous than it used to, as though if I knew where I was going with it, it wouldn’t be worth going there.  I paint to find out how I see something.

Jamie Evrard, Mirage. Oil on canvas, 31.75 x 24 inches


We tend to dismiss flowers as trifles, pretty little things. They are so much more: within each one is a delicate and ephemeral beauty containing both attraction and loss, making each one of them as large as life itself.

As the Scottish architect and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh so aptly stated:

Art is the flower - Life is the green leaf. Let every artist make his flower a beautiful living thing, something that will convince the world that there may be, there are things more precious, more beautiful - more lasting than life itself.


The artist at her studio in Vancouver, BC.