Jake Wood Evans | Transitions | Private View

About

Richly-coloured, light-imbued scenes characterise the work, in which seascapes and serene vistas appear as though through a veil or clouded glass. In one, a figure is suggested, glowing within a studio of silks and fabric; in another, a horse is suspended beneath a flood of luminosity. Leaving behind the subdued colours of previous collections, the canvases are splashed with vivid hues of gold, red, orange, turquoise and blue, whilst delicate brushwork is set alongside sweeping washes and horizontal scratches and scores.

Taking influence from the work of John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer and George Stubbs, among others, Wood-Evans’s paintings retain recognisable elements that allude to the conventions of art history. Drawing on these masters’ legacies, his intention is to capture the essence of these historic works without replicating them, depicting familiar, yet obscured subject matter. Through first creating, then scrubbing away, reworking and removing sections of a scene, the artist reveals ghostly infrastructures that preserve the warmth and glow of the original painting.