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Lot Essay
Torrents and tangles of colour course across the surface of Worked on Earth (2020), a vibrant large-scale painting by Pam Evelyn. Veins of orange, coral and burnt umber meet citric greens and yellows; pale blues and lilacs surge forth like a glacier down a mountain. The work’s landscape-like aspects are typical of Evelyn’s abstract language, which is informed by the movement and energy of nature. Her compositions are not premeditated, but instead born of an intuitive process that she has compared to a physical duel with painting, with new forms arising and submerging as chance, impulse and risk guide her decisions. In Worked on Earth, her brushwork ranges from broad planes of pigment to dark, sinuous loops and calligraphic strokes that crackle and claw at the canvas, creating a dynamic environment layered with the tensions, contradictions and evolutions of its making.
Born in Guildford in 1996, Evelyn studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art, completing her MA there in 2022. The UK-wide lockdown of 2020-21 played a formative role in her practice. Evelyn left London and moved home to the south coast, spending time in intense solitude with her paintings. She set up a studio wall in her garden and began to paint outdoors, where her works were affected by the weather and temperature as well as her changing moods. ‘It’s interesting, when you’re freezing cold and trying to focus or control a mark in a direction, your body is almost restricted,’ she recalls; ‘instead of resisting this, I allowed the nuance of the day to override my say and began to trust the paint over my own judgment’ (P. Evelyn, quoted in J. Ambrose, ‘In the Studio with Pam Evelyn’, émergent, 15 December 2021). Worked on Earth captures this sense of painting as its own climatic force. Rather than directing the action, the artist is feeling her way through a mercurial and unknown terrain.
Evelyn takes her paintings to near-destruction and back again, wrecking and salvaging aspects of the whole as she builds towards a finished work. She never settles for the safe or predictable, but welcomes elements of chaos into her process, sometimes using ‘found’ colours that emerge from forgotten pots and tubs of mixed paint in her studio. A wide range of influences inform her mark-making, from Giorgio Morandi’s landscapes and Leon Kossoff’s drawings to the stained abstractions of Helen Frankenthaler and the spontaneous, exuberant Expressionism of the CoBrA movement. The latter’s emphasis on instinct, material play and creation over theory finds close analogue in Worked on Earth. Evelyn navigates an unfolding world of colour and form, its every crag, ravine and cascade charged with the thrill and peril of open possibility.
Born in Guildford in 1996, Evelyn studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art, completing her MA there in 2022. The UK-wide lockdown of 2020-21 played a formative role in her practice. Evelyn left London and moved home to the south coast, spending time in intense solitude with her paintings. She set up a studio wall in her garden and began to paint outdoors, where her works were affected by the weather and temperature as well as her changing moods. ‘It’s interesting, when you’re freezing cold and trying to focus or control a mark in a direction, your body is almost restricted,’ she recalls; ‘instead of resisting this, I allowed the nuance of the day to override my say and began to trust the paint over my own judgment’ (P. Evelyn, quoted in J. Ambrose, ‘In the Studio with Pam Evelyn’, émergent, 15 December 2021). Worked on Earth captures this sense of painting as its own climatic force. Rather than directing the action, the artist is feeling her way through a mercurial and unknown terrain.
Evelyn takes her paintings to near-destruction and back again, wrecking and salvaging aspects of the whole as she builds towards a finished work. She never settles for the safe or predictable, but welcomes elements of chaos into her process, sometimes using ‘found’ colours that emerge from forgotten pots and tubs of mixed paint in her studio. A wide range of influences inform her mark-making, from Giorgio Morandi’s landscapes and Leon Kossoff’s drawings to the stained abstractions of Helen Frankenthaler and the spontaneous, exuberant Expressionism of the CoBrA movement. The latter’s emphasis on instinct, material play and creation over theory finds close analogue in Worked on Earth. Evelyn navigates an unfolding world of colour and form, its every crag, ravine and cascade charged with the thrill and peril of open possibility.