Artists

Rob Evans

imagesFor the past 20 years my work has focused almost exclusively on the farm and surrounding landscape in rural Pennsylvania where I live with my wife and two children. My paintings are based on direct observation of the forces of nature at work: the passage of time, the cycles of life and death, growth and decay, changes of season and weather, the mysteries of light. In many cases they are about seemingly insignificant events, perhaps an insect metamorphosing, moths fluttering around a light or a distant storm approaching. It is my hope to present these commonplace objects or events in such a way that they become unconventional metaphors for the human experience and specifically my own experiences as an artist, father, husband and participant in life at this particular time in history.

Rob Evans is an artist and independent curator who lives and works near Wrightsville, PA. He received a BFA from Syracuse University in 1981 and has been awarded grants from the Ford Foundation, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the E.D. Foundation, the Eben Demarest Trust and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.Evans' meticulous paintings and drawings have been featured in numerous solo and curated group exhibitions at such places as the Tretyakov Museum, Moscow; Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C.; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts; Contemporary Art Center of Virginia; Arkansas Art Center; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; National Science Foundation; Peninsula Fine Arts Center, Newport News, VA and an exhibition of American drawings organized by the Smithsonian Institution which toured internationally. In 2001, Evans' 10 foot long painting, Cicada, traveled to five museums around the state of Pennsylvania as part of the exhibit, Artists of the Commonwealth: Realism in Pennsylvania Painting 1950-2000 and is now on long-term display at the James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA.Evans' work can be found in many public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; National Gallery of Art; Corcoran Museum of Art; Achenbach Foundation of the California Legion of Honor, San Francisco Art Museums; Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College; Portland (OR) Art Museum; State Museum of Pennsylvania; Noyes Museum of Art, Oceanville, NJ; James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA; Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Loretto, PA; Lancaster(PA) Museum of Art; Allentown (PA) Art Museum; and the University of Delaware. His paintings have been featured in numerous books, newspapers and magazines and on public radio and television. As an independent curator Evans recently organized and guest curated the exhibit Transforming the Commonplace: Masters of Contemporary Realism at the Susquehanna Art Museum which featured major work by a group of internationally acclaimed painters including Antonio Lopez Garcia, Odd Nerdrum, and Jamie Wyeth, among others. Evans organized and guest curated the current traveling exhibition titled Visions of the Susquehanna featuring paintings of this extraordinary river spanning more than 250 years. Included are such prominent American artists as Benjamin West, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Thomas Moran, George Inness, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Charles Demuth, Lloyd Mifflin, Leonard Koscianski, Mark Innerst, Randall Exon, George Sorrels and Debra Bermingham to name just a few.