Melvyn Evans
Illustrator Painter and Printmaker
"I am inspired by the British landscape and my work references the past in relation to the future. When my father left the Navy we farmed a hill farm in West Wales. Working on the land brought me very close to the elemental in the landscape, able to see through the picturesque and understand how deep connections and bonds are formed when we live in harmony with the land. My work is very much about this connection, how we've marked the landscape for millennia with walls, boundary stones, ancient trees, carvings and markers."
"I'm interested in how communities navigated their landscape using these local reference points often giving them characteristic names some of which have now lost their meaning but all give us an insight into the past. I'm also interested in how our understanding of the landscape as being permanent has recently altered, we have moved from being in awe of the landscape to being able to influence the landscape in such a way as to produce irreparable change. The stumps of great forests fossilised and exposed at particularly low tides give us a glimpse of lost causeways like Doggerland hinting at previous upheavals and give us an understanding of the fragility of the landscape we know."
