Evan Hillis Art

Since I was a child and my brothers showed me how to draw a generic “muscle man” character, I’ve been in love with drawing. I love inventing people, and creatures from my imagination and bringing them to life on paper. From there, I grew to gain a real appreciation with illustration and fantasy art. Artists like Brom, Samwise Didier, and John Howe, were heavy inspiration for me growing up. In high school I decided I wanted to be an artist for my career and studied anatomy, and practiced drawing people and animals even more. With a decent base in realism and sci-fi/ fantasy style art I enrolled in the Herberger School of Art and Design in Arizona State University.

Once in university, my art took a turn when I learned more about composition, color theory and got a lot more practice drawing the human form. Being color blind, I had always stuck to pencil drawings using black and white and grey. Whenever trying to use paint in my grade school art project, I would mess up the colors, or paint skin green when I thought I was mixing a flesh tone. After taking a few painting classes, I learned how to properly mix a skin color and use colors to tell a story or evoke an emotion. It still is a source of mystery for me, as to what my paintings look like to others, but I really enjoy mixing paints to make new combinations and try to use combinations others might not have thought of. It is also in university classes, that I fell in love with oil paint.

Using oils is such a fun and intimate process for me. The paint stays wet for so long, that it can always be changed and blended with new colors to make interesting combinations. It’s almost as if the painting is alive. My paintings have started to take a turn to a more abstract route after I learned about sacred geometry and fractals. The basic idea with both is patterns. Patterns in nature are everywhere though it may seem like random chaos at first glance.

Sacred Geometry is a pattern of a circle, surrounded by six circles intersecting at its center, and that pattern repeats outward. This is known as the ‘Flower of Life’. Ancient civilizations around the world have depicted this pattern even though they are supposed to not have been in contact. In ancient Greece, they used the Golden Ratio to measure their buildings as well at the proportions of the human body. This is taken a step further in Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ which again shows the geometry behind the human form. In recent years Hans Mandelbrot coined the term Fractal Geometry when creating equations, still used today, to describe the self-repeating mathematical nature of the world we live in. These equations have lead us to great advances in technology, and digital recreation of natural forms, proving again that there is an order to the seeming randomness of nature.

In my paintings, I try to play with this relationship between nature and geometry. Using my background in figurative drawings, I like to juxtapose ridgid, repeating patterns with free flowing natural forms. The end result is something that is neither abstract nor figurative, but something in between that might differ for each viewer. Some might not see the image under the pattern or some may find something unintended within the shapes. I like my art to be different than traditional styles and hopefully be something interesting and new for people to see. It is also my own way of trying to further understand the universe we live in. Thank you and enjoy.