Peter Plagens wrote about this image in

Watercolor, obviously, is usually not a sculptor's prime medium. There's Rodin, of course, but the delicate lines around the women he depicts and the powderpuff light orange of their skin has little to do -- other than being by the same hand -- with the twisting weight and baroque melodrama of Rodin's best-known bronzes. And there are contemporary "sculptors" who paint watercolors on the side, but these are mostly hot-glue-gun artists -- or looser -- whose ultra-relaxed idea of what constitutes sculpture facilitates an easy, and superficial, two way conduit between it and watercolor.

Garth Evans is, however, a real sculptor: he makes coherent -- and esthetically coherent -- objects the hard way. You'd think that drawing -- no-nonsense, planning-it-out, practical drawing -- would be his only ancillary medium, with no room for that most pointedly two-dimensional medium (the paper is never hidden), watercolor. Evans's Warren Street #27 (1998) is, however, a beautifully spare, lyrically precise watercolor whose uncanny -- almost miraculous -- sense of sculptural mass is really something to behold.

In Warren Street, a central golden form sits solidly in a uniform blue background while a brighter limp duckbill-like shape within it, folds over. (That's one way of reading it, spatially; Evans's expertise with transparency gives you others, too.) The watercolor's spare luminosity strangely enhances, rather than mitigates, the gold form's sculptural heft. At the same time, the gentle precision of Evans's drawing -- most poignantly (yes, poignantly) in his deft use of a slightly bleeding red pencil line -- turns the form back toward unity with the nocturnal elegance of the whole picture. Warren Street, one of the best little paintings I've seen in a long time, glows.

PETER PLAGENS is a painter and the art critic at Newsweek.

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Garth Evans is a sculptor who also continually works on paper. He does not predict or try to control the relationship between these two activities, trusting, however, that there is a relationship between the organic forms that he sculpts and those he draws or paints. Sensitivity to the contours and tactility of surface emerge in all of Evans' work, while the weight and volume of his sculptures find their counterpart in the luminosity of his watercolors.

Evans first enjoyed recognition as a sculptor in the 1960s in his native Britain. He only began to use watercolor, however, in 1985, already well-established in the US. He was at first reluctant to attempt watercolor, but a colleague convinced him to investigate the medium. "Initially, a one-way process associated with rather slight, technical, crusty skills was offered," he says, but once the materials were bought he was soon hooked, finding his own way to keep the work open.

Evans claims that watercolor is much like gambling. Once a decision is made, it is permanent. It is interesting to compare his preferences in drawing and sculpture. He dislikes carving, he says, because "one cannot go back". And yet, Evans explores all aspects of watercolor in order to liberate it from its traditional limitations. By finding radical ways to correct in watercolor, he can be said to take an approach more like modeling than carving. He describes some of his methods as "reckless". He soaks and scrubs the work, until the paper becomes a different kind of material, in his own phrase, "kind of hairy".

"Warren Street #27" is simultaneously lyrical and monumental, at once gentle and achieving an iconic presence. The form pushes out towards the edges in some places, creating enormous tension where the contour nearly stretches out to claim the edge. The color is discovered through the journey of the making and is rich and luminescent. The work rewards the patient viewer as color and form reveal their complexity in a slow evolution.

- Jen Wechsler

Born Cheshire, England, 1934; studied at Manchester Regional College of Art, and Slade School of Fine Art, London; exhibited regularly in 1960s and 1970s at Rowan Gallery, London, while solo exhibitions at public institutions included Ferns Art Gallery, Hull (1971), Oriel Gallery of the Welsh Arts Council, Cardif (1976), and after emigrating to the United State, the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (1988); was included in the important survey exhibitions of contemporary sculpture The Condition of Sculpture, Hayward Gallery, London (1975), and curated the New Contemporaries at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1978); recipient of many awards, including Gulbenkian Purchase Award, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and Polloc-Krasner Foundation Award; a distinguished career in education has included eleven years as visiting tutor at Royal College of Art, London; since 1988, member of faculty at the New York Studio School, where he is head of sculpture.

Suggested Reading
- Michael Brenson and Garth Evans Garth Evans: The 1982 (Yaddo) Drawings exhibition catalogue: New York: Marist College, Poughkeepsie, and New York Studio School, 1997-98.

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