Into the Wilderness | Kate Evans

Kate Evans’ striking watercolour paintings capture the atmosphere and intrigue of remote landscapes, inspired by her travels to far-flung areas of America, Scandinavia and Europe.

Dilapidated barns and uninhabited cabins stand alone in a landscape punctuated only by the odd tree here and there. The vast expanse of negative space surrounding Kate’s delicate line drawings and subtle washes of colour removes any context and gives the paintings an underlying sense of mystery and ambiguity. It is as though we as viewers have arrived at the scene midway through a story playing out and it is with a mixture of trepidation and excitement that we enter these quiet, secluded places. This element of narrative in paintings is something Kate admires in the work of artists such as Peter Doig, Karin Mamma Andersson and Andrew Wyeth.

The stark compositions of Kate’s paintings contrast with the soft application of watercolour. The tendency for watercolour to pool and bleed, sometimes unpredictably, provides hints of the texture of the wooden panels of a barn or the peeling bark of a birch tree rather than accurately describing them, adding an ephemeral, dream like quality to the work.

Dutch Barn | 85x115cm | Watercolour

Riverside Hut | 70x60cm | Watercolour

Kate’s ability to create images that are quietly commanding made her a perfect fit for a commission to enhance the breakout space in the Bristol office of IT company Forgerock. With the company name and ethos in part inspired by Kjeragbolten, a large rock wedged in a mountain crevice in Norway, where according to Forgerock 'BASE jumpers from all over the world come here to take a chance, jump off a cliff, have fun, and use all their skills for an epic landing’. The brief was therefore to produce an artwork with a Scandinavian theme that would work on a very wide landscape format. Kate completed three separate paintings that worked together as a single landscape, which were then scanned at a high resolution and printed onto vinyl at a much larger scale than the originals - 1650mm high by 7300mm wide – allowing the viewer to be fully immersed in the piece.

Forgerock, Bristol

Forgerock, Bristol

We’re looking forward to exhibiting a collection of new works by Kate at the Affordable Art Fair Brussels (15th – 18th March). Get in touch for tickets to the fair and keep an eye on your inbox for the latest on Kate’s new paintings…