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Photo Sue Harrison
Bill Evaul adds paint to some of the sections on the large white-line woodblock print he made titled “Dancing Draggers.”
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Photo Sue Harrison
Lowering the paper onto the block for printing is done over and over as colors are added. It’s a painstaking process. |
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When art gets a little fishy
Evaul’s prints pay homage to the fishing fleet
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
When Bill Evaul came to Provincetown in 1970 as one of the first Fine Arts Work Center fellows, he had no idea he had found his lifelong home or that he would become the one to memorialize much of the recent past in white-line woodblock prints, an art form invented here.
Now, more than 35 years later, he and his wife run a guesthouse in Truro called The Moorlands. Evaul makes art, teaches at FAWC, has a funky band and has clearly become part of the old guard that forms the artistic backbone of town.
He has also been asked by the committee that promotes the Portuguese Festival to take part in a benefit called “Art & Fish” from 1 to 4 p.m. on Sunday at the Red Inn, 15 Commercial St, Provincetown. He will talk about the connection between the artists and the fishermen in town and will show a selection of his work based on the fishing fleet, including the large and recently completed white-line print “Dancing Draggers.”
Tickets are $15 at the door and the event includes light fare, Portuguese guitars and a cash bar.
At the benefit he expects to see lots of old friends who used to live in town and fish the fleet He has a theory about the bond that formed between the two groups.
“If you go out and risk your life at sea every day there’s got to be a certain sense of, ‘Damn, I’m alive. I made it back and don’t care what happens, I’ve already seen the worse.’ Maybe that’s why they were bemusedly accepting of the bohemians that came along,” he says.
“Fishermen understand artists because they make things,” Evaul says of the tradition of building a life with one’s own hands and labor. Now, he says, so much of that life is gone, victim of changing times and changing regulations.
“It’s one of the great tragedies of our time the way the government let down the small boat fishing fleet,” he says. “They murdered them and sold them down the river in favor of the big factory boats. It’s a reprehensible social crime.”
Thinking about all his old friends from the wharf gets him thinking about his own history in Provincetown. He remembers that when he hit town — he got right into the community. He did a little fishing and hung out with guys from the boats. He also got involved with the Provincetown Theatre Company (now The New Provincetown Players) and played music. (His band, Willie and the Po’ Boys, will play at the festival benefit on Sunday.)
“The arts here were so fabulous it was like dying and going to heaven,” he says.
He met Myron Stout who told him about the Provincetown print, a process that uses a single block for all the colors instead of one for each. That fit in well with Evaul’s background, which included teaching lithography at the Pratt Institute, in New York City, and a history of creating large prints of his own.
Evaul likes to work large and has created — out of everyday household odds and ends — a device that lets him work on prints that are over six feet long. With a mix of pulleys, old window shade cords, broken coat hangers and pieces of wood, he can lift and drop the large paper back onto the block with precision over and over while he works the colors.
From sketch, to painting to woodblock and finally to print, Evaul uses his memory to pay homage to the past.
(See this week’s Banner to read the full text of this article.)
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In the Arts
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May 4th, 2006