Janie Evrard: Wilderness Year

×

Expand

Jamie Evrard, "Rocky Shoreline Gwaii Haana," 2020

oil on canvas, 36" x 48"

In Wilderness Year, the latest exhibition by Vancouver-based painter Jamie Evrard, the artist traverses a new path on her return to the landscape genre.

Looking back on the experience of past travels, Evrard, informed by and moving away from earlier bodies of work, embraces the challenge of this source material to explore notions of wilderness both within the context of her subject matter and as it relates to the creative process itself. 

Over the course of a year spent in relative isolation, "wilderness" also came to represent "a bewildering situation" or "the state or quality of being solitary". Navigating this terrain, Evrard enacts a telling through the extension of her brush, to delve further into illusory depths of the picture space, and by extension her painting practice.

Evrard devises new techniques for her West Coast surroundings by layering her reference imagery and superimposing multiple compositions to evoke a visual exchange, a call and response between herself and the canvas. This gesture of resurfacing and overlaying traces the recall and elaboration of memory, and likewise echoes the natural movement of water reflections and old-growth canopies.

Interpreted through Evrard's hand, the soaring forests and rugged shorelines of the Pacific North West become new inspiration for mark-making and complex draftsmanship. Wilderness Year, offers an account of the artist's journey toward the realization of a singular vision.

JAMIE EVRARD

Jamie Evrard creates rich floral, landscape and still-life paintings using oil paint, monotype and watercolours. Evrard's work is included in collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, Vancouver Art Gallery, Seattle Arts Commission Public Works Collection, Government of BC, Ministry of Culture Art Collection, Burnaby Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Simon Fraser University, Maltwood Art Museum and Gallery, University of Victoria, The Claridge Collection, Montreal. Jamie Evrard received a B.A. in Art and Anthropology from Brown University and an M.A. and M.F.A. in studio art with a concentration in printmaking from the University of Iowa. She lives and works out of Vancouver, British Columbia.