Her recent book unexpectedly atop British Columbia’s bestseller list, painter Carol Evans is pleased that the book’s success is making a wider audience aware of the beauty of the Pacific shoreline she calls home.
The Shores We Call Home: The Art of Carol Evans, published earlier this year by Harbour Publishing (www.harbourpublishing.com/title/ShoresWeCallHome), includes over 80 watercolour paintings that seem to capture the ineffable, almost spiritual quality of the B.C. coastline.
“When I paint,” says Evans, “I am attempting to communicate my sense of the preciousness of creation. I see the natural world as one way that God is revealed to us. If we can perceive and appreciate nature’s awesome beauty, I believe we will do more to care for it.”
Evans grew up on Canada’s West Coast. “My mother was an art teacher so I have been around art and art materials all my life. I started my career doing children’s book illustrations, but when I moved to Gabriola Island in the 1980s I became enamoured with the wild world. The forests, ocean and beach became more attractive than the fantasy images of my childrens’ art. The little elves and creatures disappeared and I began to paint the water and land around me.”
Evans was first exposed to the Baha’i faith during her high school years in Yukon.“I met a couple, Agnes and Peter Johns, who were teaching me their Tlingit language and eventually adopted me into their family. Their daughter Doris McLean talked to me about the Baha’i Faith. I remember being impressed by her considerable international experience and the breadth of her worldview as a Baha’i, something I hadn’t expected from someone living in a small First Nations’ community.
“About 10 years later, when I began to think more deeply about the purpose of life, I remembered her words. I started to meet Baha’is and eventually joined the Baha’i community.”
Evans finds inspiration for her work in the contemplative writings of Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Baha’i Faith.
“There is so much in the Baha’i writings about water and light, so many metaphors. Water symbolizes the qualities of spirit in many of the world’s spiritual traditions and mythologies. I didn’t know this when I started, but as I learned to paint water I came to understand why it offers such a strong image of spiritual reality.”
Learning to paint water has been the greatest challenges of Evans’ career. “It’s very tricky! It took a long time to create the optical illusion of looking through water on paper. Once I learned how to paint water so it looked transparent, so that you could see the surface and the bottom and the spectrum of light moving through it, water become the subject of many paintings—yet after 30 years each one is unique. The interplay of water and light is at once beautiful and temporary.”
“I don’t specifically think about the Baha’i writings when I paint or base my paintings on them,” says Evans. “But I often pray before I start. I feel I need assistance and prayer helps me open myself to the wider dimensions of life while I work.”
Carol’s paintings “open your eyes in a way that photographs can’t,” comments her publisher, Howard White, in Arthur Black’s foreword to her new book, “and in a way other paintings don’t either. Usually, artists ‘strip away’ when they paint a canvas. Somehow Carol manages to include more rather than less.”
Evans and her husband, Bryn King, who collaborates on the publishing and distribution of her work, sail up the B.C. coast in the summer, dropping into isolated communities, where they sometimes join local Baha’is for devotional meetings and study circles.
“There is a whole life going on in rural and isolated communities in Canada that we don’t know about unless we go out there,” comments Evans. As she travels, Evans paints these people and their relationship to the shore. A number of portraits are included in her books.
Evans points out that the rich diversity—of the landscape and the people who call it home—is an essential quality of this place. “We have to work together and learn to appreciate it so we will recognize it as our common home and find ways to protect it.”
You can visit her website at: http://www.carolevans.com/Carol_Evans/Home.html.