Biography
Dick Evans was born in Roswell, New Mexico. When he was nine, the family moved to a rural farming community in the panhandle of Texas. Evans had no exposure to art at all until he started college. Fortunately, he was required to take drawing and design courses at Texas Tech as he started his presumed major of architecture. He soon realized architecture was not right for him, nor was advertising art. What he loved was painting and sculpture. At that time Tech didn’t have a fine arts program so he transferred to the University of Utah, where he obtained a BFA in Drawing and Painting, and went on to obtain an MFA in Ceramics and Sculpture.
Immediately after college, Evans began a university teaching career. His first position was back at Texas Tech University where a Fine Arts program was now offered. At the age of twenty-nine he was granted tenure. Being very uneasy about settling into one area so early in life he resigned within the month. He moved to a small village in Northern New Mexico with his wife and two children and established a studio where he made his livelihood producing sculpture and pottery. After a year he realized how much he missed teaching and returned to academia. He spent a year teaching at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Then he taught three years at the University of New Mexico. In 1975 he married for the second time; this time to sculptor Susan Stamm Evans, to whom he is still married. Also in 1975, Evans took a position teaching art at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Evans progressed through the professorial ranks to tenure, full professorship, and also a two-year stint as Associate Dean of the School of Fine Arts. In 1987 Evans made the decision to leave university teaching and devote full time to his art. Later he and Susan decided to return to New Mexico. In 1990 they moved to Santa Fe and built a house with two studios.
Throughout Evans' teaching career he was primarily teaching ceramics; therefore that became the medium for most of his personal art expression (although he also produced sculpture in welded steel and cast bronze). Evans ceramic sculptures became more and more painterly. In 1991, after several years of creating large ceramic murals, he decided to return to his early love of painting. Thus began his second artistic career as a painter.
Evans' art is found in 20 Art Museums and over a dozen corporate collections. He has had well over 30 solo shows, as well as numerous group shows and invitational shows. Examples of his work are found in 7 books and many periodicals and publications.
Regardless of medium, critics and reviewers are always struck by the richness of form and color used by Evans. Reference to the mysterious, emotional and psychological is always a primary concern. Never interested in a "realist" manner of expression, he uses abstraction to attempt to get to a deeper, more personal place. His feeling is that the more personal the statement is, the more universal it may be. By avoiding the visually expected, his art often aids the viewer to see surroundings in a different and richly rewarding manner.