Evans was born in 1907 in Aberdare, Wales. He began work at the age of 13 as a miner, but this lasted only for three years until his father's death in an accident at the Fforchaman Colliery, near Aberdare, in 1923. Evans was deeply affected by the death, his father’s body having been returned to the family home that same evening to be laid overnight on the kitchen table. At his mother's insistence, he left the pits and became a railwayman, eventually finding a job as a train engine driver for the Great Western Railway attached to the coal industry in the Cynon Valley. Evans' ability to draw was discovered by one of his primary school teachers, who gave him a new pencil and encouraged him to sketch. He stopped after a while, however, as he could not afford to buy paper. He married Annie "Maud" Lambert in 1928. They had two sons, Victor and Peter, and one daughter, Rhoda, as well as two grandchildren - Peter J Evans and Nick Evans. Evans was a prolific artist and much of his work remains, un-photographed and un-catalogued, in the custody of his two sons, in a secure storeroom. It has been estimated that, of Evans' entire output, only five percent is currently on public display.
Career
Evans took up drawing again in his late sixties after retirement. Initially he painted with his hands and with rags on square pieces of hardboard that he bought at a local DIY store and primed with emulsion. His hobby became an obsession and his small house in Abernant soon started to fill up with paintings stacked high in every room. He did not exhibit his work until 1978. In that year, at the age of 71, he held a one-man exhibition at the Arts Council's Oriel Gallery in Cardiff. He was immediately acclaimed as an original painter. Evans' show in Cardiff was followed by another at the Browse and Darby Gallery in London's Mayfair. Lawrence Gowing, Professor at the Slade School compared Evans’ work with that of Diego Rivera, the revolutionary Mexican muralist. Evans exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy's summer show and his pictures are today in many public galleries, including the Tate Modern and Swansea’s Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. In 1987 Evans collaborated with his daughter, Rhoda, to produce a book about his art ’’Symphonies in Black’’. Evans died in 2004 at the age of 97. His gravestone is engraved with the words: Nicholas Evans - Pilgrim and Painter: "I'd rather lead a soul to the Lord than paint a Mona Lisa"
Themes and style
Evans' subject matter reflected his two passions - coalmining and his Christian faith. But whereas fellow modern Welsh artists such as Josef Herman and Will Roberts had portrayed colliers as heroes, Evans typically shows them as victims. Writing in The Independent, Meic Stephens said of Evans’ work: “There is perhaps something troglodytic about his miners, even when they take part in hunger marches or, in scenes that call to mind Stanley Spencer's Cookham, when they ascend in swarms to heaven at the Last Trump, but the painter's sympathy for their lot gives them an iconic power.” Shortly after his father's death, Evans experienced a spiritual conversion and joined the Pentecostal Church, to which he remained faithful for the rest of his life. He was a lay preacher often visiting nearby valley towns to preach in the street. He explained many of his paintings in terms of biblical imagery and reported that he often saw angels and the spirits of the departed in his house. Many of Evans’ pictures place religious scenes in an industrial setting. Entombed - Jesus in the Midst, for example, now in the collection of the National Museums and Galleries of Wales, shows Christ preaching to miners at their place of work. His figures often strike biblical poses, as in Carrying out the Dead. In Black Avalanche Evans responded to the 1966 Aberfan Disaster with the painting showing the central figure of a policeman carrying a child's body, surrounded by grieving parents as in a Crucifixion scene. Many of his paintings are rendered in black and white, or with dark greys and dark blues and Evans was particularly adept at drawing colliers' tools and the brutal structures of the coalmine. Evans continued to paint until well into his nineties. An exhibition In His Oils was held in March 2001 at the Rhondda Heritage Park. Professor John Harvey, Director of the Centre for Studies in the Visual Culture of Religion at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth has described Evans as “a unique artist in Wales and unique in the genre of industrial painting, largely because I see him as fundamentally a religious artist.” and as “One of the finest painters Wales has ever produced.” The life and work of Nicholas Evans has been examined in the BBC Radio Wales programme All Things Considered
Books about Nicholas Evans
Evans, R., Symphonies in Black, Y Lolfa,
Harvey, Prof. J., Image of the Invisible: Visualisation of Religion in the Welsh Nonconformist Traditions, University of Wales Press,
