UNTITLED

A devout Christian and longtime gatekeeper at the formal Airlie Gardens in North Carolina, Evans infused her deep-rooted spirituality and love of nature into her compositions throughout her oeuvre. Completing her first drawings on Good Friday in 1935, Evans went on to create increasingly complex paintings depicting the faces of ancestral spirits and angels amidst verdant plants and animals, showing the presence of God on both physical and otherworldly planes. Her artistic process, much like her depictions, was imbued with spirituality. She famously noted, “I have no imagination. I never plan a drawing, they just happen. In a dream it was shown to me what I have to do, of paintings" (Minnie Evans quoted in Nina Howell Starr, "The Lost World of Minnie Evans," The Bennington Review, vol. 111, no. 2 (Summer 1969) p. 41).