The Shape of Stillness: John Evans

Gallery Henoch is pleased to present THE SHAPE OF STILLNESS, an exhibition of new paintings by John Evans, on view October 15 through November 7, 2026. An opening reception with the artist will be held Thursday, October 15, from 6-8 pm. The event is free and open to the public.

The exhibition brings together Evans's landscapes, waterways, moonlit scenes, and botanical paintings. A landscape painter for more than four decades, Evans has increasingly reduced and abstracted the natural world, distilling familiar subjects into arrangements of color, shape, line, and pattern. Recent works extend his vocabulary to winding rivers, the moon, and other celestial formations. These subjects offer Evans new geometries: the arc of a river dividing a landscape, the circle or blurred presence of the moon, and points of light suspended against the night sky. THE SHAPE OF STILLNESS focuses on this evolving balance between the observed world and abstraction, and the visual harmony Evans finds between the two.

"The landscape gives me a place to begin," Evans writes, "but once I'm working, the painting develops a life of its own." His process is physical and intuitive. He brushes, scrapes, rolls, sands, draws, covers, and uncovers, often putting a painting aside for weeks or months before returning to it. Images emerge, disappear, and reappear in altered form. The stillness in Evans's paintings is not necessarily his starting point, but something found through the act of painting.

In Blackstone, the S-curve of a tributary remains clearly water while becoming a pale blue shape cutting through fields of green. Evans is as interested in the curve and the way its color interrupts the surrounding geometry as he is in describing the landscape itself. In Dark Beauty, another intimately scaled painting, the moon and its hazy reflection are softened toward abstraction. Elsewhere, trees become pencil marks, boats become rectangles, and water becomes broad fields of color.

The same approach appears in botanical paintings such as Dance and Nothing Lost.  Flowers and lily pads remain identifiable, while petals, leafy clusters, and oval outlines become repeated patterns and rhythms across the surface. In Timeless, figures along a beach are similarly pared down to small vertical marks within larger expanses of color.

Throughout THE SHAPE OF STILLNESS, Evans balances this increasing abstraction with recognizable imagery and a strong sense of visual harmony. In canvases large and small, harbors, fields, and botanical gardens remain identifiable even as they are reduced to essential shapes and colors. The paintings reflect Evans's continued interest in beauty and in creating images that are, in his words, "both familiar and strange."

ABOUT JOHN EVANS

John Evans received his MFA from Boston University and has exhibited his paintings extensively throughout his career. His work is held in numerous museum and public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Evans has been represented by Gallery Henoch for more than four decades.