(Cows in a valley)

Elizabeth Fay Evans

Elizabeth Fay Evans was a North Carolina-born, Bay Area-based artist whose life of adventure informed even her quietest compositions. She worked as a stewardess out of college, where she double-majored in psychology and painting, and in the 1960s she began to pursue art professionally as both an artist and teacher. Her works often feature local exteriors and landscapes as well as intimate interiors, each piece saturated in bold, unexpected colors that express how she perceived her environs. The subject of this painting is a Northern California landscape featuring three fanciful cows which are out, standing in their field.

Mentor and colleague, artist James M. Rosen eulogized her thusly in 1980: "Elizabeth Fay Evans' art was a product of an intense inner life and vision. Although she had high esteem for the works of other painters, her own work was little affected by the art of others—and the world events around her. Her vision was of an inner reality, an interior landscape from which she produced some of the purest poetic imagery. In form and structure, she was a most original plastic artist. The romantic imagination, which is starved or misdirected in so many artists today, who dazzle with brushstroke and surface quality, or imitate the click of the camera or reflect the fiction of other discourses, found full expression in the stronger forms and intensity of this imaginative painter."

Elizabeth Fay Evans, painter, was born in the township of Lake Waccamaw, North Carolina on 23 November 1940. She attended one or two semesters of college before becoming a stewardess with United Airlines. After quitting that job, she settled in Hawaii in the 1960s and it was at that time that she began to paint. After four years in Hawaii, Evans moved to San Francisco, California where she attended classes at the Art Institute.

In 1971, Evans received a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony and several years later she received a Helene Wurlitzer Foundation grant and spent the summer in Taos, New Mexico. Evans also earned her BA degree from Mills College in Oakland: hers was a double degree in psychology and painting. During the 1970s, Evans became ill with a progressive sclerotic disease and her life became a battle to remain independent and to fulfill her passion to paint. For a brief time, Evans was an adjunct teacher in the art department at the Santa Rosa Junior College.

Elizabeth Fay Evans died at age 40 on 15 July 1980 while visiting North Carolina.