Student paints his anxiety

Rather than his art driving him to madness, UNM student George Evans said his madness drove him to art.

After a year of work as a UNM mechanical engineering major in 2003, Evans said he dropped out because of severe anxiety. By the end of 2004, he said he was in a manic episode that lasted halfway through the next year and took him six months to recover from. During this time, he found that alcohol diminished his anxiety and paranoia, resulting in an addiction. He quit drinking April 5, 2008, and entered a 12-step program. He said that later he found solace in art.

“I’m an atheist, so I had to find some sort of higher power,” he said. “For me, that quickly became something I could physically observe and see progress in, and that was art.”

Evans said he still experiences a certain level of anxiety, which inspired his bachelor’s honors thesis solo exhibition “Anxiety Control.” The exhibit is in the John Sommers Gallery in the UNM Art Building through Friday, April 20. He said the desired effect on the viewer is similar to that of Mark Rothko’s series of immense abstract paintings in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, which have brought people to tears. However, instead of tragedy, he wants his viewers to experience anxiety.

“I want people to see them, and either worry about themselves or the painting or the artist. Not in a pitiful way, but out of concern for their own thought processes,” he said. “I think anxiety spurs creativity, it spurs action, it spurs discipline. I don’t think it should be pure anxiety because that’s just debilitating and traumatic.”

Scott Anderson, one of Evans’ professors, said Evans’ work has therapeutic value but it also raises issues of universal importance.

“I think most people can relate to this constant struggle between chaos and control,” he said. “George’s paintings, like any artworks, don’t resolve anything. They provide an occasion for reflection.”

Evans’ work has elements of both anxiety and control. He controls his painting with a narrative he sketches out before he paints.

This functions as a jumping-off point for the anxiety elements, which are the parts of the painting he improvises, stream-of-consciousness style like a loss of control. UNM’s art studio program requires more art history classes than most programs in the country, and Evans said styles and images he’s learned from painters come into his paintings when improvising.

“What I want the real joy to be in the paintings is for someone to come up and sort of go on this little scavenger hunt, like ‘What did he sample, what was he thinking about when he created some of the styles in the painting?’” he said.

In the midst of depression and alcoholism, Evans said he believed in virtually everything. His paranoia tinted his view of reality similar to the way the improvised elements in his paintings evoke a sense of anxiety.

“I found myself thinking I could walk off buildings and land on ethereal planes, I had number codes and color codes,” he said.

“It’s sort of a pet peeve when people are like, ‘You’re just thinking differently or you’re just seeing the world differently, in a more profound way,’ and it’s not like that. You’re not seeing the world, you’re seeing your own version of the world without any basis in reality.”

Upon recovery, he found he didn’t believe in anything.

This led to a theme in his work, object cultural nihilism, which Evans said is sampling from art movements and processes without staying faithful or committing to any of them. Because of this, the viewer must take his or her own meaning from the work, just as humans have always assigned their own meaning to objects and ideas.

“Not that I don’t think ethics or morals or even having a philosophy or thought process is bad, I just don’t commit to anything,” he said. “I think that ethics are a good idea, but I think they’re malleable.”

“Anxiety Control”
by George Evans
BFA honors thesis
solo exhibition
John Sommers Gallery, second floor of
UNM Art Building
Through Friday, April 20