Welsh Journals

Nicholas Evans: Paintings by a Mad Pianist JOHN HARVEY This article presents a broad introduction to the Welsh artist Nicholas Evans, considering his paintings from a number of interrelating perspectives: art, religion, industry, and music. In doing so, it is maintained that Evans's paintings are not simply pictorial documents of coal-mining, and argue that within the social milieu of working- class and Nonconformist culture in Wales they have a religious significance. Nicholas Evans was born in Aberdare, Glamorgan in 1907 and became a pitboy in a local colliery at the age of fourteen. He left two years later when his father, who was also a miner, was killed in a colliery accident. For the remainder of his working life Evans was employed as a fireman on the Great Western Railway.2 He started to paint in retirement, at the age of seventy. What began as a hobby for Evans developed into an obsession that, in the course of fifteen years, resulted in a large body of paintings which are remarkable in their consistency of both form and vision. Almost all the paintings are uniformly four feet square and made on battened hardboard primed with commercial white emulsion. The primed board is covered in an opaque layer of Lamp Black oil paint, and the image is created, for the most part, by a subtractive process: the paint is rubbed away using fingers, rags, and sponges to expose the white ground. The majority of these works depict scenes from the history of coal- mining from the late eighteenth century to just after the mid twentieth century (Plate 1, p.247). The imagery has been drawn not only from Evans's own experience as a miner, but also from a lifetime's observation of the collieries and colliers of Aberdare. Thus, unlike many of the artists of the South Wales coalfields principally Josef Herman (b.1911), a Polish émigré, the Scottish painter George Chapman (1908-94), and Jack Crabtree (b.1938), a Lancaster artist