Margaret Evangeline is a contemporary painter, sculptor, and installation artist who lives and works in New York City.
Born in 1943 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Evangeline’s Cajun grandfather taught her the ways of the family farm from a young age, bringing her along to the cotton gin when the crop came in, and teaching her how to shoot, ride, and fish. As a child Evangeline absorbed these traditions, but even as she immersed herself in the south, a vision was already forming in her of a future as an artist in New York City.
By the time she was twenty, however, Evangeline had married and left Louisiana State University to live in Big Spring, Texas with her new husband, a pilot in training at Webb Air Force Base. The odyssey that followed continues to inform her work today. While the practice of painting remained an active passion for Evangeline, her family was growing quickly and she raised her three children while moving around the US before finally settling in New Orleans. It was there that Evangeline’s nascent artistic career took root. By 1978 she had become the first female recipient of an MFA in Fine Arts from the University of New Orleans.
MARGARET EVANGELINE’S PAINTINGS
EXPLORE SENSORY AND PERCEPTUAL THRESHOLDS
Hudson, New York- Elizabeth Moore Fine Art, 105 Warren Street, is pleased to present the exhibition “Fleshy Oily Deep and Dense” recent paintings by Margaret Evangeline from Monday May 24 to Saturday June 26, 2021. Gallery hours are from 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Thursday – Saturday, Sunday 12 noon to 5p.m. (Monday by appointment).
“Fleshy Oily Deep and Dense” features 16 paintings produced between 2019 and 2021. These artworks come in a variety of sizes ranging from 72” x 96” (such as the 2019 yellow abstraction Yellow Rooms Make Her Cry) to a series of intimately scaled zinc-white gestural abstractions slightly larger than a sheet of copy paper.
The exhibition features Margaret Evangeline’s lush abstract paintings that explore a vital engagement with imaginary worlds. As the title of her show suggests, Evangeline’s inner worlds are manifested through the artist’s commitment to the overt physicality of gestural brushstrokes engaged with such undeniable precision so as to suggest the unexpected poetic encounter with momentary truths. The artist’s oil-on-canvas works are poised between the intersection of pure abstraction with semi-recognizable, suggestible patterns and motifs. Among those are visual allusions to the floral structure of the ever blooming camelia flower. Evangeline has been fascinated with the camelia form for nearly two decades; for the artist this is a generative motif that recalls everything from expanding nebulae and galaxies, to turbulent weather conditions, to flickering Eastern mandalas. Evangeline’s aesthetic vision in “Fleshy, Oily, Deep and Dense” embodies a shape-shifting engagement with the self that is simultaneously lyrical, playful and rigorous. The artist has made it her life’s work to explore transient states of being and fleeting states of mind.
In her studio notes the artist writes: “ ‘Fleshy, Oily, Deep and Dense’ the exhibition title refers to viscera and the process of creating paintings….One of the painters I admire is Texan, Forrest Bess for his honesty and for a certain blankness I feel in them. Most of the white paintings of this show are about blankness. If you sit with a blank like a beautiful clean sheet of paper, something will emerge…This is how consciousness works.
The white paintings follow from the bullet paintings I began in 2001. When bullet holes pierced a metal surface in that series of shot paintings, it created the most satisfying marks I had made up to that point. Now when my brush cuts a satisfying trace through the dense oil surface, it pleases me in that same way…I have been reading a biography of Francis Bacon, Revelation, by Mark Stevens and Analyn Swann, 2021. From Francis Bacon’s pope paintings, I am inspired to outline blue planes and green transparent planes that cut into the white painting fields. These are like the imagined flat surfaces that sometimes box in Bacon’s figures….As the Camellia paintings often refer to wounds, they sometimes form themselves by healing over an old cut and at times I like to paint over old paintings. Sometimes there are shadows leaking from the Camellias, just as a shadow often leaks from a Francis Bacon's Holy Fathers.Yellow Rooms Make Her Cry, recalls an emotional response I once had visiting a room in the Winterthur Museum years ago. That profound response to a space is still mysterious to me and I wanted to invoke that spirit in a group of paintings.
In her studio notes the artist writes:
It’s still there on the refrigerator door,
The poem you sent for my birthday,
Because it makes me smile,
Because it has made me smile for two years,
Everyday,
You said you knew because
We have the same DNA.
The news this morning of your passing
reminds me that when we choose,
Brother/sister love can abide
even when your DNA
comes out engineer, mine comes out artist.
Our last visit
There was
A small Camellia painting
hanging above your bed
(not that we mentioned it).
But this was the one, the very blue one, a small but Fleshy Oily Deep and Dense one.
I sent it to watch over you.
At home, a refrigerator door poem from you
Watches over me,
"Birthday wishes from the dog:
Two things,
#1 Happy Birthday
#2. I don’t know anything about the poop in the kitchen…
But mostly the first thing.”
When you were eight
you began whatever you bustled off to do
with a humming tone from the William Tell Overture
and then you galloped away.
Margaret Evangeline has shown her work in solo exhibitions at Stux Gallery, New York City and Kim Foster Gallery, New York City, Lee Weber Gallery, Greenwich, Ct. and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans. Group shows include those at the Brenau College Museum of Art, Gainesville, GA. The Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, LA. Upcoming exhibitions include, Erin Cluley Contemporary Gallery, Dallas, Texas.
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For further information on “Fleshy Oily Deep and Dense” contact Elizabeth Moore, Elizabeth Moore Fine Art, 105 Warren Street, Hudson, NY. 12534. (646) 321-3419.
Info @elizabethmoorefineart.com