David Evans
at Three Highgate/Liss Llewellyn
David Evans (1929-1988) might be one of the great missing links in British art.
Man and Cat in Sitting Room (1975)
Openly gay and countryside-based, he painted huge watercolours that fused a counter-cultural aesthetic reminiscent of the 1968 Beatles film Yellow Submarine with a poetic delicacy that evokes the great Michael Andrews, a near-contemporary. If that sounds jarring, it is – but really quite excitingly so. The dozens of pictures in this delightful show can broadly be divided into three categories: portraits of male acquaintances; space-age interiors of clubs or theatres; and captivating landscapes of industrial postwar Britain. In Evans’s hands, a feature of the landscape as commonplace as an electricity pylon takes on the quality of a fairy tale; a motorway curving through the artist’s beloved Suffolk countryside, meanwhile, becomes a shining white ribbon carving through fields and hills. No surprise to learn, then, that Blake and Samuel Palmer were touchstones. It’s a joy to discover his work: museum buyers, take note.
Prices on request.
3 Highgate High Street, London N6
(020-3795 7200). Until 12 July
