Pam Evelyn, A Look at Life, 2021.
Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, London. Photo by Michal Brzezinski.
Spend time with Pam Evelyn’s paintings and you might—for a while at least—almost hear crashing waves, taste salty air. Her recent solo exhibition in Berlin was entitled Spectacle of a Wreck, and that title operated on several levels: maritime imagery is frequently hinted at in the British painter’s works, and there’s a concomitant sense that her compositions themselves arise out of a process of repeated strategic wrecking and partial salvage, destruction of what was there before until a sense of vivid spontaneity is achieved, as if the painting had achieved its final form in an instant. And then there’s the iconography. Consider the recent canvas A Look at Life (all works mentioned 2021), one of the paintings made for her presentation for Independent: a number of the whitish and red forms within it resemble sails, though whenever one uses them to, as it were, anchor a viewpoint—across a putative harbor, for example—and move your eye around, the painting tilts on its axis, another compositional element countermanding any horizontal view. One feels to be looking at once across and from above, perspectives clashing. At sea.
Pam Evelyn in her studio.
Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, London. Photo by Michal Brzezinski.
This disorientation, allied to the title, might shift your perspective of what Evelyn is up to. On a practical level, a painting like this does contain the real-life experience of being by water: the artist partly grew up on Scotland’s Isle of Bute and in Bracklesham, West Sussex, on the south coast of England—polar opposites in terms of terrain—and frequently returns to coastal areas to sketch outdoors, gathering tumbles of form. But she also paints in a studio in East London, with police sirens regularly scything through the air outside, and her art is thus a productive meeting of two perspectives: the slower, airier time by the sea—where, as anyone who has lived there knows, you simply think differently—and its recollection amidst metropolitan tumult. In the paintings, the maritime world is infused with headlong pace and concrete clang. And yet this is to suggest that they’re figurative works, which they’re not; nor does the above constitute anything like definitive subject matter.
Note that title again, A Look at Life, which might suit a novel, and then look back at the painting, survey its purposeful entanglement. It’s composed of visible decisions and revisions, surprise directional shifts. The background was clearly a darker color, then covered with a pale green scrim. The composition seems like a temporary cessation of whirling activity, a breather amid continual activity. Insofar as this is, indeed, ‘a look at life’, a viewer might receive a shock of recognition: that a painting in which things went once one way, then unexpectedly another, and did so repeatedly until an improvisatory conclusion is reached in the present, can feel like the typical human experience of existing, being.
"..and her art is thus a productive meeting of two perspectives: the slower, airier time by the sea—where, as anyone who has lived there knows, you simply think differently—and its recollection amidst metropolitan tumult."
-Martin Herbert
Pam Evelyn, Assisted Step, 2021.
Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, London. Photo by Michal Brzezinski.
A Look… is one of a number of paintings that Evelyn painted lately with a shared, surprise-ensuring origin point. She made, effectively, instinctual drawings on the canvas, and then the turbid color schemes followed, like orchestrations behind a lead melody, each responding to the emotional tone of the initial gestures and then, in turn, responding to each other. The result, in a work like Assisted Step, also part of her New York presentation, is bravura and off-beam composing: the landmass of tomato red in its lower right corner effectively destabilizes the painting, twisting it on its axis, while serpentine forms hover above and, in the left corner, a patch of pale cerulean hints at sky. Navigating this painting is a slalom for the eye, one that might leave a viewer with surprising thoughts about the state of abstract painting today. If elements of Evelyn’s art nod back to and synthesize aspects of Abstract Expressionism and the St. Ives school (again, the city and the seaside respectively), her art argues that such styles contain a residual charge, serve as a toolkit for articulating something of how it feels to be alive, in a different world. Evelyn’s art, she said during a recent studio visit, is the result not only of looking at landscape and seascape but of looking at people, particularly in the city. Something of the texture of being alive today, amid the compound pressure of twenty-first-century reality (which need not be itemized here), is encoded in it: a sense of how one struggles through life’s reversals and hairpin bends.
Pam Evelyn, Routine Escape, 2022.
Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, London. Photo by Michal Brzezinski.
To speak somewhat of the lives of others—to make something a viewer might see themselves in—Evelyn has, in turn, to strategize to evade herself. One reason why she likes to draw on landscapes, she says, is that drawing and painting what’s already there takes her out of herself, so that she doesn’t dominate the conversation, a generous and space-reserving attitude to the spectator. Equally, to hear her tell it, she has to paint herself towards a point where she loses control, where impulsion takes over, where her conscious mind is sidelined, where the painting breathes, an entity in itself. On Evelyn’s studio wall when I visited was a large canvas she’d just finished, which was replete with evidence of her undoing, self-dodging method: she’d pasted large regions of linen on top of some areas, making areas that might have scanned as figurative less descriptive, and elsewhere placed paper on areas of wet paint and lifted it off, leaving unpredictable spectrums of color underneath—escaping what she knows.
To take in that work, or others by Evelyn, is to be reminded that abstract painting is still fathoms-deep with potential for analogizing that hazy yet visceral condition, being. While her art is sometimes in dialogue with the art of the past, such is the surety of her technique—including her awareness of when to relinquish control—that the viewing experience enacts itself thrillingly in the present, in a relay between painting and mortal viewer, who may be constantly reminded not of art but, again, of life lived. One of the works in her Berlin show was entitled Inside—it presented an electrified tangle of lines dancing on an abraded ground—but the title could have applied to any of them, since the psychological landscape is her purview. Or, if landscape feels like the wrong word for such fluidity and flow, the oceans we contain within us, the ever-changing waves that reach our shores.