Promise IV

Promise IVEvan explores abstract imagery and mark making through painting and drawing processes that investigate structure, constraint, and expressive visual form. Working with acrylics, his work emphasizes gesture, movement, and a taxonomic approach to organic and pseudo typographic forms. His interest in systems and high contrast imagery comes from a 30 year career in visual and interaction design, while his themes and use of traditional materials reflect a

Evan explores abstract imagery and mark-making through painting and drawing processes that investigate structure, constraint, and expressive visual form. Working with acrylics, his work emphasizes gesture, movement, and a taxonomic approach to organic and pseudo-typographic forms. His interest in systems and high-contrast imagery comes from a 30-year career in visual and interaction design, while his themes and use of traditional materials reflect a conscious departure from that practice.

Before turning to fine art studio work, Evan founded and led multiple design consultancies and helped launch and support nonprofit creative ventures including 3S Artspace and TEDxPortsmouth. He teaches at the Dynamic Media Institute, the graduate design program at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he earned an MFA in Design.

About this collection:
This six-piece series of acrylic paintings includes Promise I–IV and Decline I & II is a reflection on aging and shifting perceptions of self. Possibility and wonder, resignation and detachment are overlapping conditions that coexist across a lifetime. Echoes of our younger perspectives return, fade and surface again throughout our lives.

The works suggest organic forms that feel familiar yet indeterminate. The structures act as stand-ins for memory, emotion, and physical change—at times reaching, at times collapsing or quietly reorganizing. The Promise works lean toward openness and possibility with the Decline pieces emphasizing resistance and surrender, mirroring the reorientation that occurs as time and lived experience reframes our outlook and sense of identity.

Together, the series considers aging not as a linear progression, but as a continual renegotiation of meaning—where growth and decline are inseparable and where beauty emerges unexpectedly.