Nicholas Evans-Cato


Jewels and Constellations




Mar.17 - Apr.15

Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. To frame the everyday is a simple thing. But my task is to trap the exceptional. Whether I am outside on site, or working from memory in the studio, painting is a personal, idiosyncratic process founded in obsession, and wonder.

Transit, (9"x9", oil on linen, 2009)

However, my attraction to a particular street or building comes from a suspicion that it is also, in a sense, nameless. I nurture enduring relationships with a terrain.  

Yet I come to recognize its pictorial potential only when a place seems eligible for inclusion in a larger catalog of spatial forms, and in this way my paintings are less mere portraits of the local than un-bound pages in an expansive, borderless inventory of space and light. Their index-like titles and typically symmetrically balanced compositions advocate for the monumental, appropriate to a classifying program.

Street (8"x11", oil on linen, 2010)

   It is neither a landscape's planning nor its architecture which conjures the shapes I paint. Rather, it is its observation; it is how a place appears that forms a distinct and resonant typology. At street level, tight, box-like canyons of space offer motifs best captured in a square format. While from a rooftop the optical distortions of curvilinear perspective weave parallel lines into trajectories mirroring the dome of the sky. And on a clear day, the path of the sun traces analogous curves across it. 

 Only my turning in place forges a panoramic view, revealing skyand street as events. As is the Sun, glare, fog, rain, and snow are deliberately organizing factors in my choice of standpoint, and I wait for and design with all of them. Many small paintings take years of watching. 

 Land maps posit an objective viewpoint. But astronomical 'maps' are simply precise drawings made from Earth's orbit. The Constellations are mnemonic tools which gather together otherwise unrelated stars for the purpose of giving recognizable shapes to an empirical measure of time. Likewise, framing architectural geometries inside four corners requires witnessing. In the dark, the apple is not green. Time and light render the American vernacular something delicate, less an anchor than an apparition. I am sustained by its silence, and its modesty.

Bridges (6"x18", oil on linen, 2007)

Nicholas Evans-Cato was born in Brooklyn, and has had a studio in Vinegar Hill since 1995. He is currently represented by the George Billis Gallery in New York City, and his work has been featured in the New York Times, Harper's Magazine, the New York Sun, and on PBS, NY1, and WBAI. His work is in the collections of The Museum of the City of New York, The Brooklyn and New York Historical Societies, as well as numerous private and corporate collections. He currently teaches drawing and design at Rhode Island School of Design.

To view more of Nicholas' work go to 

 http://www.georgebillis.com/artists/nicholas_evansCato.html