Flame Lily News and Views

The Joan Evans Gallery is being continuously added to. Go to the main menu on the home page, or click on the following to see the gallery:

http://www.flf-rasa.org/home/JoanEvans/JoanEvans.html

Here is a bit of history for admirers of Joan Evans’ work.

“I get an enormous amount of pleasure out of my work, and people seem to like my pictures:’ says the Rhodesian artist, Joan Evans, whose interest in painting “started, I think, when I was about two years old.”

Her talent continued to grow under the guidance of her father, Colonel Capell, a former Commissioner of Police, but as a child, Joan “never went to art school” and then “hadn’t much time for painting” during the first twenty-two years of her married life, which were spent on a farm in Bindura. Later, however, she began working in oils in Salisbury and her first exhi­bition was opened by the then Sir Godfrey Huggins in the State lottery Hall in 1953. A further exhibition in 1960 established her in the public eye and, since then, “people have got used to my style of painting and they particu­larly want me to do M’sasas because these are Rhodesian,” while her land­scapes have become symbolic too.

Although Joan Evans has her own studio in her home and works a nine to five day, her rapidly executed compositions are still drawn from life. Her husband has always been a “terrific help in driving me around and stopping by the hour” as she works on her sketches, which are later washed in with her characteristic water colours. On other occasions, her many visitors des­cribe their favourite scenes, and with the help of her twenty sketch books, imagination and the creation of an atmosphere, she reproduces these for her clients. Her pictures come in ten sizes and are in great demand in many parts of the world, including Hong Kong and Russia and particularly in Southern Africa. In addition, for the past sixteen years, Joan Evans has been painting ‘Scenes that are used by charities and eighty to one hundred thousand of these Christmas cards are sold annually.

Joan has been criticized for her “picture postcard approach,” but insists that she paints “as an ordinary person in the street sees a scene and not as an art connoisseur” and her work adorns many an office and home. The National Gallery of Rhodesia has bought a modern and a pen and wash of an old tree that she saw on the way to Malawi, but she is not keen to develop a new style, because “it’s not me.”

Mrs. Evans has had a remarkably successful art life, but she does have an’ ambition to paint a masterpiece and feels that .a picture showing Piggs Peak, in the Prime Minister’s home town of Selukwe, will turn out to be “something special.”

On a wider scale, she enjoys painting her own casual arrangements of “splashy flowers,” is “very fond of the sea and the Drakensberg.” Trees remain a favourite subject though, and she once sat in a paddock in the midst of ten bulls in order to paint a “super old, old fig tree.” Still finding that her “first pleasure is in going out into the bush” and with sixteen of her works hanging in the House of Assembly, Joan Evans, through her associations and her achievements, is one of Rhodesia’s ambassadors in oils.  Heather Jarvis

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 8:43 am and is filed under Historical, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.