(Boo sleeping progression) - from the "Boo Series"

Elizabeth Fay Evans

A sweetly humorous "progressive" piece showing the changing light of day as it filters into a colorful interior, the artist's dog "Boo" napping in a square of sunlight as it moves across the floor; and in the last section, twilight, and a vacated space signifying Boo's search for the next adventure.

Evans' dog Boo featured in several of her smaller works, perhaps owing to his inadvertent skill at holding so still.

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.

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."