Issue 10, Profiles

Pam Evelyn

Staying with the Surface

Words JAE KIM

Photography JACOB LILLIS

For Pam Evelyn, painting acts as a long-term conversation with a space. Her studio answers to the pace of her work. A canvas might lean against a wall for years — untouched by her hand, yet remaining deeply woven into the life of the room. It becomes a silent roommate. “I’ve had a painting in the studio for three years,” she says, speaking with a patience that borders on devotion. “Its presence keeps challenging everything else.” This relationship between action and presence sits at the core of her practice, developing through sustained attention and renewal.

Her early understanding of the world relied on the physical weight of images. Drawing arrived easily, a native language she understood before she had the words to describe it. “I didn’t take to the written word naturally,” she explains. “I learned in a much more visual, physical way. Drawing was instinctive to me in a way writing never was.” Painting remains the center of her thought process. Images lead every movement, while language enters much later, if it appears at all. Her canvases hold that specific order of operations, acting as places where thought takes physical shape through surface, density, and control.

The visual logic of this thinking first took form in the houses of worship. There, belief traveled through color and sequence. “The function of art and storytelling first came to me through church, through stained glass and the stations of the cross,” Evelyn recalls. These images structured her sense of time and movement. They taught her how a picture holds moral gravity without needing a single instruction.

Encountering historical painting later in life felt like a profound recognition. “Seeing paintings later that told those stories I grew up with was a big deal for me.” Tintoretto’s Christ Washing the Feet of the Disciples (1575-1580) continues to surface in her thinking. It remains a vital encounter with painting’s capacity to distribute vulnerability across a surface, allowing humility to register entirely through the curve of a gesture.

Evelyn’s abstraction grew as a slow drift away from the body, never making a hard break from the figure. Her early drawings stayed close to fragments — eyes, mouths, and the curve of flesh or plant life. Life drawing taught her how a form leans into the space around it. Eventually, those edges started to give way, and the boundaries softened. “Form and background are always shifting,” she says, describing the energy of her work. “A very restless surface.” The canvas stays awake, refusing to settle into a neat order or hierarchy.

In Deluge (2023), any clear sense of what is “in front” or “behind” disappears. Paint moves across the two joined panels in thick and thin layers, with scraped marks and dragged colors that push forward and pull back simultaneously. Pale grays and sanded whites keep the space open. Bands of yellow, violet, and green flare up for a moment before the surrounding strokes swallow them. The vertical seam breaks the flow, forcing the eye to jump rather than rest. No part of the canvas acts as a stable anchor. The surface demands that the viewer keep moving, following the shifts in weight and pressure as they happen.

She treats the act of looking with the same gravity she gives to the act of making. “Painting is not all about application,” she insists. “It’s just as much what doesn’t go on as what does.” This belief dictates the rhythm of her studio, where long silences carry as much weight as a brushstroke. “Looking and making are equal,” she says. “They rely on each other but ask for different kinds of involvement.” These two modes work together to shape the final piece, with the hand introducing the material and the eye deciding its consequence.