The Greenlandmans Song

Initially trained as a marine engineer, spending time working on submarines, Melvyn Evans studied illustration at Exeter College of Art and Design, followed by a year at Goldsmiths College, London. He then took up drawing classes at the Royal College of Art under the tuition of Bryan Kneale RA. He became a professional artist, printmaker and illustrator in 1992. His work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK, including at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Royal Academy, the Royal College of Art and Somerset House

Painting references printmaking, the surface is important in evoking the same sense of the past. Leaving traces of previous marks, scratches, shapes and colours creates a half forgotten narrative running below the surface.

I am inspired by the British landscape and my work references the past in relation to the future. When my father left the Navy we farmed a hill farm in West Wales. Working on the land brought me very close to the elemental in the landscape, able to see through the picturesque and understand how deep connections and bonds are formed when we live in harmony with the land.

The Cornish landscape has been marked for millennia with walls, boundary stones, ancient trees, carvings and markers. I’m interested in how communities navigated their landscape using these local reference points often giving them characteristic names some of which have now lost their meaning but all give us an insight into the past. I feel sketching and drawing in this ancient Cornish landscape seems to enable me to tap into this latent energy moulding composition and texture.

I’m also interested in how our understanding of the landscape as being permanent has recently altered, we have moved from being in awe of the landscape to being able to influence the landscape in such a way as to produce irreparable change. The stumps of great forests fossilised and exposed at particularly low tides give us a glimpse of lost causeways hinting at previous upheavals and give us an understanding of the fragility of the landscape we know