Painted Poetry: The Art of Mary Page Evans

Painted Poetry: The Art of Mary Page Evans by Scott, Bill. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781555953744.

Wilmington-based painter Mary Page Evans works directly from nature, en plein air, seeking to capture a specific landscape, figure, tree, or sky. She is engaged by particularity, making an effort to establish the locale, the time of day, and the quality of light. Not surprisingly, her influences include the French impressionists and post-impressionists, as well as the abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell. Evans has worked at Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny and names Cézanne as an inspiration. The painter Gene Davis described Evans’s paintings as “hymns of unadulterated joy,” and her accompanying exhibition, Painted Poetry: The Art of Mary Page Evans, promises to be a gorgeous celebration of nature and the human form, as well as a retrospective covering more than forty years of the painter’s distinguished career. “Art history has always played an important role in my work,” explains Evans. “Having absorbed the structural lessons of Cézanne and the ‘push-pull’ principle of Hans Hofmann, I try to loosen the form and let color determine the structure and create the space. I strive for a visual back-and-forth in the space resulting from forms and colors reacting to each other—like music.” Evans is widely collected and has works in the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; and the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, PA, among others. Bill Scott is a Philadelphia-based painter and critic. Danielle Rice is the executive director of Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, Delaware.