Exhibitions: Call and Response

In two series of related oil paintings on wood panel that together form CALL and RESPONSE, Evelyn Pye explores human dimensions of time, space, and scale through a profusion of indoor plant life punctuated by a discrete infusion of domestic detail.

The exhibit has roots in a series of small-scale works dating from 2013. All of these panels are in the range of 9 X 12" to 12 X 14". And these intimately-scaled paintings contain a similarly intimate content, depicting plants that had originally belonged to and been tended by the artist's mother. One, a Peace Lily, even goes back a generation earlier, to her grandmother's funeral."I began to paint my mother's plants, including some paintings of her seated in my father's easy chair surrounded by her plants," says Pye. The small panels became an ensemble, exhibited together and entitled The Winter Sun Came in To Warm Itself by the Fire.

Pye revisits those paintings this year, with CALL and RESPONSE. But a different time frame also shifts the scale."I have painted new works that are scaled-up versions of the originals, approximately twice the original size.  I have also painted the plants anew at this larger scale," she explains. Now, Pye tends the plants herself, pulling them out on the deck in summer and back into the house in the fall. And that Peace Lily, originally from her grandmother's funeral? It is now, she reports,"unbelievably heavy," the hardest plant to move each season with its flourishing foliage.