David Evans: Sunday, 5pm

David Pugh Evans RSA (1942-2020) was a celebrated artist, known for his realist paintings often depicting ordinary subjects set in atmospheric surroundings. Evans’ earliest work shows a strong interest in working from nature but his time at the Royal College of Art, London, was coloured by the overwhelming influence of American abstract art in 1960s London. Working primarily on figurative studies, he grappled to find his own style, pulled between the preference of the time for abstraction and his personal inclination towards naturalism. However, the period after his time at the RCA saw Evans moving towards the realist style for which he is known, with the paintings of the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte of particular influence. Paintings of wide horizons glimpsed through architectonic surroundings and dramatically lit empty chairs show a Magrittean fascination with the surrealism of the mundane.

From 1975 to 1976 Evans travelled around the USA using the Greyhound bus service. This trip compounded his interest in subjects of the everyday and produced paintings of motels, gas stations and road signs glowing in otherwise dark surroundings. The seedy roadside hotels in which he stayed also became important, with empty corridors and solitary figures in dimly lit interiors appearing repeatedly. Spatial devices and the effects of light continued to preoccupy Evans through the 1980s as he undertook large-scale oil paintings often featuring figures painted from life, situated in exquisitely observed interiors. The subtle differentiation of light and shadow on surfaces often seems to be the subject of the painting itself.