Pam Evelyn is one of the UK’s most exciting emerging painters working in abstraction today. Her gestural, colourful paintings delight in the richness of oil painting; its opacity, viscosity, mess, physicality. Embedded with feeling, her works are characterised by large swathes of colour that push and pull with each other, creating highly-charged expanses of expression.

 

Lithography is an important process for Evelyn as it mirrors the act of painting, allowing her to work out brushstrokes and understand the effects of a composition on a smaller scale. This beautiful work, Hesitate, suggests the doubt, uncertainty and risk that comes with creating a new work of art; the potential hesitation before Evelyn begins, or as she is laying down marks:

'The discomforts of not knowing what I am about to embark on is my main duel with the canvas, a sometimes toxic and tricky dance full of turmoil and risk. I avoid any formula or the comforts provided in a plan. For me, like life, painting has no security, and a willingness to accept going through a death of a painting, or the destruction can sometimes be the closest I get to understanding its nature.' —Pam EvelynHesitate embodies this sense of spontaneity. With bold, graphic lines of varying thicknesses, the composition carries a sense of improvisation. Evelyn worked into the lithograph with orange and blue paint to imbue this unique work with colour. 
 

Pam Evelyn (b. 1996, Guildford, UK), lives and works in London, UK. She is currently a student at the Royal College of Art, having graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019. She has a forthcoming solo exhibition with The Approach, London, and has exhibited with Peres Projects, Berlin, Hockney Gallery, London, and Baert Gallery, Los Angeles. She is the winner of the Cass Art Prize and is the recipient of the Herbert Seaborn Memorial Scholarship Prize at The Slade.