It is not often that a husband and wife have received a Bermuda Arts Council Award on the same occasion but that is the case this evening since Amy and Vaughan Evans, married for 50 years, are each being honoured with a Lifetime Award for their outstanding contributions over the last 49 years to art and art education in Bermuda. As you will hear, during their 50-year marriage they have been each other’s best supporters, admirers and critics.
Amy Evans
Amy, to start with alphabetical fairness, has been well known for her watercolours celebrating the scenic beauty of Bermuda and for her prints reproducing the originals. She is also a former vice president of the Bermuda Society of Arts and juror for the Bermuda Craft Market.
Her work has been often chosen for exhibitions held by the Bermuda National Gallery, the Bermuda Society of Arts, Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art, and the Bermuda Arts Centre at Dockyard, as well as by Gallery 117 Front Street. Indeed, Amy was invited to exhibit in the first Biennial Exhibition, held in the National Gallery in 1994. She would go on to exhibit in the following seven Biennials while also exhibiting in the Gallery’s 2015 “Marking Territories” event. Her work has also been chosen for the Charman Prize Exhibitions at Masterworks, with two of her pieces receiving Highly Commended Prizes in 2005 for her “Knock Down” and in 2009 for “Demolition 2”. In addition, in 2009 she also won first prize in the Masterworks’ “Art in the Park” exhibition. She is an honorary member of the Masterworks Foundation and has work in the present Charman Exhibition. However, her work has also been shown outside Bermuda, most notably in Santo Domingo’s 3rd Biennial of Caribbean Painting.
In addition to creating art, Amy has helped others fulfil their artistic potentials through her teaching for many years at the Bermuda College and at the Bermuda High School for Girls, where she prepared students for GCSE and Advanced Placement art exams. She has also offered workshops for corporate groups in international businesses in Bermuda, and for mature students at the Seniors Learning Centre.
Born in Northern Island in 1942, Amy was exposed to art from the start, thanks to her grandparents, who would buy her new pencils, erasers and pencil cases before the new school year began in September. She was always drawing and painting, learning from her grandfather how to draw horses. A painter and decorator himself, he allowed her to use his tools and paint. She would decorate the dolls’ houses and cots her made for her. Her primary school also encouraged her art by letting students paint castle walls and enchanted gardens on flats as sets for the annual school concert.
By the time she attended high school, there was no doubt in her mind she would study art. Winning the school cup for the highest mark in advanced art, she went on to study at the Belfast College of Art, earning the National Diploma in Design and the Art Teachers Diploma. Taking the teachers’ diploma was, she says, the best decision she ever took. During her first year at Art College she met Vaughan, neither of them even thinking about what they would go on to achieve in an island three thousand miles away. But after teaching high school in Northern Ireland for a few years, she and Vaughan came to Bermuda with their tiny son, David in 1968. When he was older, she would begin teaching in the Art and Fashion Departments at the Bermuda College.
Amy joined the Bermuda Society of Arts in 1970 and started exhibiting her work soon after. Her medium in those days was mainly Batik, which she would use to create large wall hangings. In 1982 Gwen Cann, a textile artist and herself the recipient of a Bermuda Arts Council Lifetime Achievement Award, invited Amy to join her in a two-woman show called “Designing Women” held at the Bermuda Society of Arts Gallery, at City Hall. The show, which also included paintings, was a huge, sell-out success, spurring her on to keep creating. Her Batik “White Bird of Paradise”, featured in an American Textile magazine, is a work Vaughan particularly admires. “This work has such power,” he says, “because of its size, colour & rhythmic composition all pulled together by a master designer.”
For some time it hung in the lobby of Grotto Bay Hotel.
As she says it has been marvellous she and Vaughan share the same interests, making their travel plans simpler since they want to see the same sights. They naturally discuss their work together and encourage each other. Sometimes they share the same subject matter. She particularly remembers a series of Banana Patch paintings they created near Tom Moore’s Jungle. One of hers was chosen for the 1994 Biennial while one of Vaughan’s was chosen for the 1996 Biennial.
Although her favourite medium is watercolour, she is now working with layer & mixed media, which have given her a much greater artistic vocabulary. The effects of storm surges (like Hurricane Gonzalo) on the fragile Bermuda shorelines have inspired her to create a new series.
These days she spends part of the year in France where she has often won prizes for “Concours de peinture” – outdoor competitions held in towns and villages in the Bordeaux region of France. However, she is still very much part of the Bermuda art scene so that we are sure to see more of her work exhibited here.
Vaughan Evans
For the last four decades, Vaughan has been both a dedicated teacher and a successful and well-known figure in Bermuda’s art scene, whose paintings, pen and ink drawings and woodcut prints have been regularly exhibited in the Bermuda Society of Arts Gallery, the Bermuda National Gallery, Gallery 117 Front Street, and the Bermuda Arts Centre at Dockyard. His work has been accepted in all but two of the National Gallery’s Biennials since 1996. In addition, he has received Honourable Mentions in the Charman Prize of 2010 for his “King Neptune” sculpture, and of 2011, for his “Kites Over St George’s” wood cut print design, while being the 2013 Charman Prize winner of the Design Category for his Indian ink drawing entitled “Howard’s Cycle Yard”. From 1989-1992, he also served as President of the Bermuda Society of Arts. Under his leadership, an Exhibition of Bermuda work in the Society of British Artists Show was organized in the Mall Galleries in London. His pastel “Road Through Flatts” was one of the exhibits.
In 1992- 1995 his pastel “Cave Pool “ was part of a UNESCO -sponsored touring show, “Carib Art”, organised by Ruth Thomas and exhibited at the UNESCO HQ in Paris, France.
Had any clairvoyant predicted him his future when he was a child, he most likely would have received the prophecy with total disbelief. While his childhood was a loving one, it did not give him clear signals he would follow a road to artistic success. Born in 1942 in Bangor Wales, he lost his father to Hodgkinson’s disease when he was just two years old, thus necessitating for the family several moves, not conducive to continuity which often helps academic success. Later his mother married again and once again the family moved, this time to a different country – his new home now being in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He found school difficult, perhaps because as his mother said, “All you ever want to do is to go out & play!” After leaving school and working for a while, he decided he wanted to do forestry. With this in mind, he took his ‘A’ Levels in sciences at the Belfast Technical College, significant because upstairs in the building was the Belfast School of Art where he first met Amy. The art studios and print shops attracted him so that eventually he had a change of plan: he would go to teachers’ training college in Belfast to become an art teacher. Little did he realise that he’d be trained to be a general subjects teacher for both primary & secondary pupils as well. After marrying in 1967 and teaching in Northern Ireland for a short time, Vaughan and Amy found themselves on a British Eagle charter flight to Bermuda in August 1968. Experiencing Bermuda’s evening warmth on their arrival, he thought it came from the plane’s engines, at the same time mistaking the tree frogs’ song for the call of seabirds.
Vaughan began his teaching career on the island at the Whitney Institute and became very involved in the School Council and in working on the school floats the students created every two years for the Agricultural Show. His float in the 1976 Show, themed “The Seven Deadly Sins” and based on Spenser’s Faery Queen, would years later inspire his 2016 Biennial print. Eleven years later Vaughan went on to teach at Saltus Grammar. As he says of his teaching career, “I had the privilege of teaching some exceptionally talented students. You give to them and as it goes in this world, you always get back so much more.”
It took a while for Vaughan to begin exhibiting as he was busy helping with fatherhood related activities, gardening, rugby and sports, as well as with school. He also furthered his qualifications by taking a B.A. and an M.Ed at Queens in Kingston, Canada, which, in his words, “was a huge deal” for him. “It seemed like the higher the level I was working on, the better I seemed to do.” But he describes Amy’s joint show with Gwen Cann in 1982 as a wakeup call spurring him on to exhibit more of his own work. His first group show was in 1984 and he has been exhibiting both here and abroad ever since. Like Amy, he has been participating in plein air competitions in France.
He is widely admired for his woodcuts – Amy particularly admires his “Comber Potato Field “ Triptic (in the 2016 BNG Biennial) because she says he took a mundane subject and found wonderful patterns and textures combined with rich colours.”
His favourite medium, however, is pen and ink. “I love drawing,” he says “& I love the fact that you cannot go back in a pen & ink drawing. What you say is what you get. It is true magic.” Today many former Whitney teachers can see that magic in the prints of a pen and ink drawing depicting the Institute he gave them as presents when he left in 1979.
Like Amy, he has been participating in plein air competitions in France but will certainly continue to show his work in Bermuda. V&A, as they jokingly refer to themselves in e-mails, are both presently working on the 2018 BNG Biennial theme “What we share”. Definitely, there is more to come.
