Dick McEvoy was first and best known as a painter in pastels, a medium he came to master. Decades of experience found him painting en plein air in all of the famous haunts of the Impressionists throughout France. But those pastels - even those from his native New England - were typically in smaller formats. So when he ventured instead into the medium of oils and attacked large canvases, the experience was a catalyst that encouraged him to more deeply explore the techniques of the Abstract Expressionists. His bravura brushwork has naturally evolved and he frequently uses the butt-end of his paintbrush as a stick to engage in his own drip-action painting. Squint at any large McEvoy oil on canvas and any number of famous members of the New York School will come to mind. But McEvoy has not run amok into the world of non-objectivity. Like Andrew Wyeth, he has remained intimately tuned to nature but has created a new expression that elegantly synthesizes the vocabularies of both the Impressionists and the Abstract Expressionists. So, while his large canvases are still recognizable landscapes, and are delightfully enlivened with Monet's brilliant red coquelicots, daisies, and bachelors' buttons bathed in sunlight, they dance atop fields of grass that could have been painted by Pollock. In short, McEvoy captures nature's choreography with a technique that not only reflects the best of two major movements but shows that they are really not the irreconcilable opposites many have assumed.

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Peter Hastings Falk
Chief Curator & Editor
RediscoveredMasters