Born in Cardiff in Wales, Merlyn Evans grew up near Glasgow, and from 1927 studied at the Glasgow School of Art. In 1930, he exhibited at the Royal Scottish academy and the Glasgow Institute of Fine Art. He gained a Scholarship to the Royal College of Art and throughout his career he made etchings and aquatints and sculpture as marble carvings and bas-reliefs. His dedication to painting, however is expressed in his continued productions even during his service in World War II. As a soldier in North Africa, Syria and Italy, he was involved in heavy fighting. His works are often haunted with overt political statements, and more frequently, with images of his disquiet. In 1988, Mel Gooding described elements of the artist's works: Few artists are as critically conscious as Evans was of the fact that art is a means…by which we may picture and make visible those hidden relationships, correspondences and parallels…Evans wrote “I proceed form the general to the particular, from the abstract to the concrete”…His imagination was of a philosophical temper, finding forms of expression that were essentially metaphorical, presentations that have about them a theatrical air of ritual or ceremony, and intense formality. His paintings and prints even at their most rigorously abstract have always a subject, they refer always to something beyond, something encountered in the human world.
Margerie Few New Art Centre, London Design Research Unit, London
London, Leicester Galleries, New Paintings by Merlyn Evans, March 1953, number 4 Sao Paulo, British Council Fine Arts Department, Biennal II, 1953-4, number 89 London, Art Exhibitions Bureau, Four Modern Painters England and Wales, 1955-6, number 9 London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Merlyn Evans, October-November 1956, number 46, illustrated on plate XXI
Mel Gooding, Merlyn Evans, Cameron & Hollis, Moffat 2010, page 111, illustrated page 113