(Django Evans. Photo by Future Filmworks)
Django Evans Featured at Cascade School of Music
The Cascade School of Music (CSM) has new artwork on display in its atrium and lounge area, paintings and drawings by Django Evans, a 12-year-old aspiring artist. Django’s exhibition includes 18 small-to-medium size paintings featuring wildlife and Central Oregon scenes as well as a wall of 12 framed drawings of birds, reptiles, one insect, and a lone tiger. The landscapes are vividly colored renditions of local favorites like Smith Rock and mountain and river motifs while the animal imagery features the young artist’s favorite subject, exotic birds and sea turtles.
Like many artists, Django started drawing at quite a young age, three, and hasn’t stopped since. When he turned ten, Evans received a gift of acrylic paints and began painting on canvas. As he reports in his Artist Statement, “Around age 11, I knew that I wanted to become a professional artist. Now I am making and selling more art, saving up for more art supplies, and eventually art school.” Django’s determined vision is apparent in the many works currently on display at CSM, and ten percent of all sales from his show will be donated to the school as a gesture of gratitude for its support of his art.
Of the 18 paintings, there are several that particularly stand out, some of which have already sold! Havasu Falls, for example, is a striking painting that demonstrates Django’s early efforts to understand his materials, namely acrylic paint and the texture one can build on the surface of the canvas substrate. Red Tailed Hawk shows the artist exploring perspective with the avian predator in close-range profile, high up on a perch and peering down below, possibly in search of its next meal. Another bird painting, Peregrine Falcon, shows an aggressive subject rendered in blacks and grays flying directly towards the viewer in a bold display of foreshortening and against a sky that transitions from yellow to green.
Various techniques are present in the acrylic paintings, from stipling and palette knife use to powerful mark-making and flat areas of color. All show Django’s burgeoning sensibility to value and color where dark and light contrasts and subtle gradations in hue distinguish the animal from its immediate surroundings.
Sea Turtle is one of the artist’s most daring compositions as it is the only painting in the collection that shows multiple animals within the space of the single canvas. The giant tortoise is featured in ¾ profile as it swims towards the viewer, its right flipper extending off the left-middle of the canvas. A medium-sized, bright yellow fish with red stripes swims in the opposite direction below the massive reptile in the lower-right of the canvas while a dark, smaller fish faintly appears in the distance. The differing sizes of the three creatures assembled in the painting clearly establish a foreground, middleground and background, thus illustrating Django’s efforts to grapple with space / depth.
A personal favorite is Barn Owl, a frontal portrait of the beloved bird in browns, off-whites and siennas against an abstract background of yellows and oranges. There is a clear sensitivity, perhaps empathy, the artist is experiencing in rendering the owl, and the vague, abstract background is the perfect foil to the detail present in the face and body.
The suite of 12 drawings in both pencil and colored pencil showcases the young artist’s already well-developed dexterity with these mediums. Six of Django’s feathered friends depicted in colored pencil, examples of which include Mandarin Duck, Bee Eater and Kingfisher, beam with great attention to detail, particularly in the plummage, while the Rattlesnake, Tiger and Wolf Spider are executed in more of a black and white format. All drawings show the subject carefully rendered against the stark white background of the paper, centering the viewer’s focus on the animal itself.
To view Django’s exhibition, please visit the Cascade School of Music at 510 NE Third St. in Bend. Hours of operation are Monday through Thursday, 10am to 7pm, and Friday from 10am to 6pm. The school is closed Saturdays and Sundays. To purchase a work, simply inquire at the front desk where a receptionist will be happy to assist. To contact the artist directly, please email djangotheartist@gmail.com.