MARINE ART LIVES
CARL G. EVERS was born in Germany as a British citizen. He earned honors at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, and came to the United States only in 1947, having left his early work in Germany as marine and civil engineer in 1931 to spend the intervening 16 years doing commercial art in Sweden. "My idea when I came here was to do painting that would be art rather than continue in commercial art," he has said.
14
"I wanted people to hang the prints of my works on the wall." Thousands of Americans have done just that, for example through the distinguished marine print program of the U.S. Naval Institute, which has reproduced more of his work than any other single artist. At first, Carl settled in San Francisco. But Moran Towing, Farrell Lines, and Ian Ballantine the publisher-early enthusiasts for his fine watercolors-were in New York, so he moved east and today lives in Southbury, Connecticut, with his wife Jean, whom he married in 1964. His ability to enter into the experience of ships at sea seems almost uncanny, but is founded on exhaustive, utterly methodical research and study of the subject from many angles. He is skeptical of loose enthusiasms, and dedicated to getting at the truth of a ship, a scene, a situation. The fervor of his life is embodied in his art, which is lumi-
nous, challenging, utterly unique, as though hours, years of study had produced a kind of freedom to do in paint what can hardly be painted: the coldness of the sea, the integrity of design of a ship, the play through everything of a sea wind which you can smell in his paintings. Carl claims that he is selftaught, and his hard-earned career might bear that out. But his mother was an artist, and there is beneath his flawless technique, a mind and spirit at work that understands the anger of the sea, and the drama of man's navigation of it. The Marine Art of Carl Evers, published in 1975 by Bantam in paperback, Scribner's in hard cover, shows in nearly 50 paintings of Carl's, the superb achievements of his lifework in art. Evers, South Street, 1879. McKay's Glory of the Seas picks up her tug to come into New York's sailing ship waterfront.