The Intimate Storytellings of Karis Evans
This article was originally published on Hue & Eye.
Karis Evans, aged 32, has been living in Amsterdam for 4 years where she has built a life for herself. She has recently taken on the role of an artist mentor and curator for St-Art. A creative company engaging with up-and-coming artists who want that extra support in the art community.
Karis comes from a family of creatives who has always understood and encouraged her artistic values. She undertook an illustration academic course, which led her to produce mainly hand drawings then taken into a digital finishing approach. Illustration has always been Karis’s primary technique until her approach to painting. Nowadays, indeed she will consider herself as an illustrator with a painter’s soul. The main reason why Karis is driven by producing art and finds in the painting process the great satisfaction is to have a disposable space to outlet her emotions.
She has an intuitive approach to life, and as she moved to Amsterdam pushed by a genuine love for the city, in the same way, she feels drawn into painting personal, intimate subjects. To Karis, a canvas is a journal, space where to share with oneself a pure feeling. As Karis’s family resides in Wales, a country hugely influential in her work, and as she loves the nature and history of Wales, Karis enjoys to explore the relationship with familiar subjects and. Karis has a very attached and sentimental personality and likes to fill her canvases with these emotions. Her illustrations though, are something she does more lightheartedly and usually inspired by the women in her life, while her paintings are to her more profound. She fills these with symbolic expressions that “comes directly from the heart,” as she says. Most of her paintings indeed are outcomes of notes and poetry she previously sketched, so we may, without a doubt, state that her tone is of personal storytelling.
Karis Evans currently has another fulltime job outside her art, which is of team coordinator for a famous fashion brand. As she recently joined St-art, this helps her to recenter her attention to art. Karis organizes painting workshops for St-art twice a week. She plans to exhibit more in Amsterdam, especially with her latest body of work Details in the Renaissance, an ode to the renaissance and her love for the details in life. However, it is the Pre- Raphealites that has always been a fascination and a consent source for inspiration since she was a young student.
Karis is also working and experimenting with fashion illustrations, but we will talk more about this soon.
