ERICKSON FINE ART GALLERY
324 Healdsburg Avenue, Healdsburg, California
Christopher Evans- Guest Artist
Supply Chain Portraits
Christopher Evan's Supply Chain Portraits explore the rough, complex terrain of relationships connecting Western consumers, natural resources, ecosystems, indigenous tribes, and the world’s poor living at the edge of the global economy. Each painting is centered on a person working at the source of a supply chain that fills a basic need in artist Christopher Leith Evans’ daily life: the gasoline in his car, the wood of his kitchen table, the paint on his canvas, the coffee in his cup, and the iPhone in his pocket. Collaborative work with artists and advisors from Africa, Asia, and the Americas provides the foundation of knowledge and compassion at the heart of these monumental humanitarian visions.
EXTRACTION
Art at the Edge of the Abyss
Cobalt Blue. 2012. oil on acrylic on canvas and paper, white ink on black Kozo paper, papiers colles. 78 x 108"
Cobalt Blue features a miner in the Democratic Republic of the Congo emerges from a rocky hole where he digs the “conflict minerals” from which smartphone electronics and artist’s oil paints are manufactured.
Artist Christopher Leith Evans was born in 1954 in Bremerton, Washington. His grade school years were spent in Brightwaters, Long Island, in the suburbs of New York City. In 1972, after graduating from Bay Shore High School, he moved with his family to Santa Monica, California.
In the autumn of 1973 Christopher began attending the University of California, Los Angeles where he studied with such renowned artists as William Brice, James Valerio, James Doolin, Tom Wudl, and David Hockney. Although conceptual art, performance, and video were popular art forms of that time, Evans chose a path of traditional oil painting and the realistic representation of Nature and the human figure. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1980.
Christopher Leith Evans’ paintings have been shown in galleries and museums in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. His three-hundred-sixty-degree spherical panorama from the top of the World Trade Center, New York Full Circle (In the Light of Memory), was described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as “exhilarating”.
Throughout a decades long quest to see beyond the boundaries of the two-dimensional picture plane and to find deeper personal and cultural context for the pictures he makes, Evans has been on a journey of exploration starting from wide angle panoramic landscapes, to triptychs, to painting on spheres, to ultimately creating large multi-picture canvases composed around an ellipse. His Supply Chain Portraits present encompassing views of pressing global issues such as fair trade, social justice, and environmental degradation, with concern, compassion, and hope.
Evans’ prodigious skill as a painter has also propelled him into other visual realms. He has worked with George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg and Martin Scorsese creating matte paintings for movies such as Star Wars, E.T., and Hugo. In 1983 while working at Industrial Light & Magic he became the first artist in history to paint on a computer. Collaborating with the George Coates Performance Works in 1986 he helped introduce the technique of using computer generated projections to create theater sets. He has also produced historical paintings for National Geographic magazine and museum installations.