Christopher Leith Evans: Gathering Distance

Evans is able to explore the psychological and spiritual places in nature that break the traditions of representational landscape. Growing up in New York and receiving an MFA from UCLA in 1980, Christopher now resides in Sonoma County where he gathers, with his paintings, the place and topography that surround him.   – Kate Eilertsen, Curator

LOCATION: The Studio (bldg. #2 on map, lower right)

As a painter, Christopher Leith Evans has had a multi-faceted career that has brought to him a wide range of experiences, awards and honors including travel assignments with National Geographic, working with film directors George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Martin Scorsese, an Oscar nomination for Special Visual Effects, grants from the Ford Foundation and the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and an Honorary Doctorate from the Academy of Art in San Francisco.

Christopher Evans’ landscape paintings of the past decade are inspired by the rolling hills, oak trees, reflecting waters, and expansive skies of Northern California’s Russian River valley where the artist lives.

The pure, elemental forms seen in rocks, water, branches, leaves, sky and clouds, are the natural resources from which the work evolves. The paintings themselves have a remarkable clarity of atmosphere, a quality of light, a time of day, and specificity of place that gives one the sensation of being there, or the feeling of wanting to be there.