THE FOCUS

A native of Mississippi, Marlos E’van; painter, musician, filmmaker, honed his signature style of obsessive scribbling, found materials, and commercial imagery while observing cultures in different cities and communities across America. E’van earned his BA from Watkins College of Art in 2016 and resides in Nashville where he currently has a residency at the McGruder Center. Both he and his work are being nationally recognized as an important voice on cultural and social commentary. Growing up in Mississippi, E’van wa...

Joshua Bienko: I’m interested in how you construct a painting. I just saw “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible" at The Met Breuer. It was incredible. There’s a Rubens painting where the horses and people in the background are rendered in high detail, like 30 or 40 of them. Right down to the kind of thread they’re wearing, but in the foreground, the horse’s head that carries Henry IV, is still sketched out in two or three different positions. It’s trans...

My work is about the places where the concerns of modernist painting meet my own experiences and the physical reality of the body. Often the subject matter is a visual bridge between painting tropes and the objects of everyday life. The lines of a lawn chair seat serves as a veiled reference to the grid, and its breakdown – presumably by human weight – to an imagined encounter with the human body. Eleanor Aldrich - studio visit July 2016 My work is textural and...