Art & Culture: The Shores We Call Home: the Art of Carol Evans

Those who enjoy the watercolorist’s art or who admire the rugged coastline of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest will enjoy The Shores We Call Home (Harbour Publishing). Carol Evans is a master watercolorist based on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia’s Gulf Island chain. Beautifully reproduced in The Shores We Call Home, Evans’ work is luminous, surprising: this is the work of an artist is clear control of her materials and confident about the subjects she chooses.

Since shores are the thing that connect the 80 or so watercolors included in the book, we see a lot of light dancing off water under many circumstances and in a lot of different places. Evans knows what that looks like and, more important in this case, she knows exactly how to convey it in both paint and words:

Water hangs in great silken sheets of fog across mountains and inlets. It ripples and reflects along the shore. The wet, delicate, and raw subtleties of watercolour washes are ideal for conveying the gradation of light within clouds or a summer haze, perfect for suggesting shapes and forms barely visible in shrouded mist or streaking rain.... It has a wild quality and although the water can be somewhat controlled, it cannot quite be tamed.