44. Jane Evans
Orchard Landscape (Mapua)
Oil on board
45.4 x 60 cm
Signed & dated 1977
est. $4,000 - 6,000
Fetched $6,750
Relative Size: Orchard Landscape (Mapua)
Relative size

October 1977 New Zealand Listener review, art commentator John Roberts perceptively sums up the effect and relationship between Jane Evans and Philip Clairmont.

Compare her works with Philip Clairmont's, for example - their themes are very similar. Like Evans, Clairmont develops his ideas from the immediate world. A window frame, a clothesline, a table are enough to set him at work. Clairmont and Evans both employ a style clearly derived from the conventions of postimpressionism and expressionism. How then is it possible for them to be so wildly different in their impact? It is partly a matter of colour. Evans uses warm ochres and reds, Clairmont

Cold greens and blues on a sombre ground. But it is more than that. Clairmont's objects are pawns in a game of asserting visual authority first over the object - the rectangular piece of canvas or hessian - and then over the viewer. Evans couldn't be less interested in power. Her paintings are like old friends, familiar even at first viewing. A Clairmont on the wall would brace up everyone in its immediate vicinity each time they encountered it. An Evans would relax and please. Some would say that was in a certain sense a less important function. I cannot agree. I admire both the power of Clairmont and the comforting warmth of Evans.