LA and New York Influences

From the catalog: "The Creative Spirit of Evelyn Dawson Wynn ," Washington and Lee University, April 24, 1996

In 1944, Evelyn Dawson married James A. Fitzsimmons, a painter and photographer. While living in Los Angeles, they socialized and worked with Surrealist photographer Man Ray and Jungian analysts James and Hilde Kirsch. Those contacts became formative influences on both artists. In 1949, the couple moved to New York, where Fitzsimmons worked as an art critic and Dawson became “Suzy Perette,” a design position she held until 1963.

In a 1955 article about Dawson and Suzy Perette, newspaper columnist Dorothy Roe mentioned that Dawson was painting “modern works.” The artist called them “inscapes” — a word that combines “interior” or “inward” with “landscape” to indicate that these abstract works flowed from her unconscious. The term “inscape” was coined by nineteenth century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who defined it “as the very soul of art.” The word was adopted by visual artists in the twentieth century, including Surrealist Roberto Matta, and American Abstract Expressionist artists James Brooks and Jane Frank. The term is still used in the visual arts to refer to works that reflect an artist’s “internal landscape.”

Dawson’s paintings reflect the influence of Abstract Expressionism, an art movement that originated and evolved in New York. Influenced by the Surrealist interest in the unconscious and the theories of psychoanalyst Carl Jung, artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko created very large, non-objective, and expressive works that were made spontaneously to elicit emotions. These artists represent the two primary directions of the stylistically diverse movement: action and color field painting. In her work, Dawson merges elements of both.