After meeting as students at St Albans Art School in the late 1960s, Fionnuala Boyd and Leslie Evans married and began to work collaboratively. They make paintings using photographs and slides as source material, which seem at first to be straightforward, slick figurative representation. When looked at closely, the world they portray appears warped. There are intense colors, distortions of space and scale, and figures and animals juxtaposed in strange, alienated relationships with each other and their environment.
Boyd and Evans are influenced by the dramatist Harold Pinter. Pinter has described how he was prompted to write The Caretaker after observing two people together, and this inspired Boyd and Evans, who began to use disparate figures in their work. They admire Surrealism, particularly the art of Rene Magritte, and distinguish their art from realism. In a statement accompanying their 1996 exhibition at Flowers East, they wrote: 'Representation is a language, and as such can lie and fantasize. Although most of our pictures represent credible situations there is no rule, and we often play with surreal spaces and situations'
Boyd and Evans's work was first shown at the exhibition Narrative Painting in Britain in the 20th Century held at the Camden Arts Centre in 1970. Since then they have exhibited at the London gallery owned by Angela Flowers. They continue to work with the same polished technique (although they have changed media, from spray paint and acrylic to oil on canvas) but their subject matter has diversified. As artists in residence for the Royal Geographical Society in the rainforests of Borneo they made a series of striking paintings of the lush vegetation. |
