Bernard Evans (b.1929)

Bernard Evans painting at Newlyn Habour

Another senior member of the Newlyn Society of Artists is Bernard Evans who works in a large and handsome granite house at the top of Newlyn Hill overlooking Mount’s Bay. It is his home, his studio and his school. Below is the fishing port of Newlyn with its multitude of boats and scenes of continuous activity. On the high ground behind his house is ‘Higher Faugan’ the mansion that Stanhope and Elizabeth  Forbes built in 1901. The port and its activity provide a continuing subject for Bernard Evans and the memory of the realist painters of the previous century still acts as an inspiration for his work.

Newlyn Fish Market - Bernard Evans

Bernard Evans's studio at Trevatha

Bernard Evans was born in 1929 in Toxteth, Liverpool, and brought up in Dovecot, five miles away. After National Service he went to Liverpool School of Art for two years, and later spent three years at Camberwell School of Art in London, which was then going through one of its many changes. There was a move towards abstraction although the Euston Road School influence was still strong. For Bernard Evans the chief influence was that of the German-Jewish painter Martin Bloch, a refugee from Nazi persecution of the pre-war years. After his training at Camberwell, Evans took a teaching diploma at the London Institute of Education where he also met his wife Audrey, who was a student on the same course.

In 1955 he returned to the North of England to teach in Bootle and then in Darlington. After spending some ten years in school teaching he became Head of Department at Nottingham College of Education. It was the dramatic news that the college, although successful, was to close due to demographic reasons that made Bernard Evans consider his future direction. He was now married with a family of five children and it was a brave move that took him to Cornwall. In 1976 he moved to Newlyn to set up the ‘Mounts Bay Arts Centre’, a residential school devoted to outdoor painting which operated for ten students each week during the summer months. It was a family business; the teaching and the domestic work were shared between Bernard and his wife Audrey, also a painter who had trained at the Thanet Shool of Art. After many years they decided that the year 2001 was to be the last in which the school operated.

It was initially the light and the landscape of Cornwall that attracted him rather than the presence of other artists, but gradually he came to know his near neighbours such as Denis Mitchell, the sculptor, and John Wells the painter, and others in the Newlyn and St Ives groups. He became an active member of the Newlyn Gallery and was closely associated with many of the changes and improvements that have taken place over the years; until 1999 he was Chairman of the Newlyn Society of Artists.

Bernard Evans has a large and spacious studio; exotic plants and work in progress struggle for space. His work is bold and strongly coloured. Much of his work is painted to completion out of doors. In his studies of buildings there is often a predominance of blue, against which the golden colours of  buildings seen in the late sunlight shine. At other times he makes large drawings, as much as five or six feet in length, also made out of doors and over several visits. These may remain as drawings in their own right or may be the basis for paintings. He finds many of his subjects close to his home, such as the fish market in Newlyn lying below his windows, which he has painted many times.

Old Quay Harbour Newlyn  1995

Recently over several months, Bernard has been working on a series of large paintings of the River Thames and the Houses of Parliament, and other London scenes seen at various times of day and at night. One of Bernard’s sons, Peter, works for Shell and has an office on the twenty-second floor of the Shell Building in London overlooking the Thames. He obtained permission for Bernard to paint from windows in the hospitality suite. This is directly painted work, accurately rendered and obedient to the laws of perspective. He captures the atmosphere and mood of London at different moments and he feels that he is following the same tradition of observed painting  that brought Monet to London in the 1890s. Other paintings have been done from the ‘London Eye’ of the panorama over the Thames of London seen from the great height of this slowly moving wheel. Working from a moving vehicle, Bernard can only make sketches, amplified by photographs which serve as a basis for painting. It is unusual for him to work from photographs, although for this project there was no other way.

Extract from book on Newlyn Society of Artists