An artist finds her place in the eye of the storm

NATICK - Carolyn Evans couldn't wait to escape her native New Orleans, yet on canvas after canvas she returns to the Gulf Coast.

Evans grew up feeling claustrophobic in a home where the windows were rarely opened, but houses are her favorite image.

She seethes with indignation over government culpability in the Katrina catastrophe, but whimsy rather than wrath infuses her artwork.

Evans's contradictions may be as tangled as her thicket of dark hair, but spend an afternoon with the 61-year-old South Natick artist, and it all starts to make sense.

The Danforth Museum in Framingham is presenting Evans's show "Katrina's Third Birthday, No Cake" through Oct. 19. The title is playful, but with an edge - like her work and the woman herself.

After Katrina swamped her hometown, it was as if a levee burst inside Evans. Though she hasn't lived in New Orleans for more than 40 years, the storm unleashed a torrent of emotions: fury at the environmental degradation that left New Orleans so vulnerable to catastrophe, contempt for the government's abysmal response to the hurricane, and, on a personal level, anguish over the loss of the house that had been in her family since the '40s - a place that evokes memories both warm and bitter.

Not that any of this would be immediately apparent from her work. Evans is not one to browbeat viewers with messages. Rather, she chooses to be subtle and tongue-in-cheek, while sticking to the conviction that art should be timeless. "In the end, the painting has to work as a painting," Evans says. The pictures "are political, but you don't need to know that to appreciate them."

Her husband and fellow artist, John Evans, describes her at work: "She starts with a Rorschachian mess, just throwing paint on the canvas - and then something will spark a memory."

Carolyn Evans says she takes whatever happens to be on her palette and washes the canvases - which range from 10 inches to 70 inches in width - with color. She likens her sweeping motions to dancing, an art form she practiced when she was younger. While she paints, jazz echoes through her two-story-high studio, and she riffs along with the musicians. "You move from one area to the next until it starts to have some sort of composition, stuff happening," Evans says. "Then you start pushing the composition."

In "Night Watch," the "stuff happening" happened to be the houses that took shape in the upper right of the canvas; the rest of the painting emerged from there. The roof of the house on the right started out as a random smudge. Only later did Evans realize that it resembles "a hat or a doo-rag." "These things happen in paintings for me," she says. "I don't know why."

Standing on stilts, with a tree in the foreground, the houses are "sort of dancing" the night away, she says. But the houses have a serious mission as well. "They are looking out on the water, telling the tree that he's going to be all right. And he's growing back. He's old, but has new growth on the top. So it's hopeful."

Houses abound in Evans's work. "These houses are all me," she says. "They're autobiographical. I grew up in a dysfunctional house."

Southern inhospitality

Evans was raised in a large house - "like those you'd find in Wellesley or Weston," she says - just outside New Orleans. Her great-grandfather had been a shoe peddler who made the rounds of the countryside accompanied by a mule bearing samples. Her grandfather started a shoe wholesale business and, during the Depression, acquired a sugar plantation in return for a loan to a farmer who had fallen on hard times. As young girls, Evans and her sister visited the plantation, which still had its slave shacks.

Evans says her own parents were not particularly attentive to their daughters. "They liked living high at the country club or night clubbing," she says. But her memories of going fishing with her dad left an impression; her art is well-stocked with aquatic life, often where you'd least expect to find it. Her mother's influence shows in the paintings as well. Evans's houses are generally open to the elements, a reaction to her mother's insistence on keeping the windows shut to the steamy Gulf weather. Evans says it was really the family's servants - "my black relatives" - who raised her and her sister.

That was common, she says, among the privileged Southern girls with whom she played and partied. That charmed life, though, came to an abrupt end: "When I was 16, when all the kids I'd gone to school with were coming out as debutantes, I was left out because my last name was Rosenberg."

Her mother told her to ignore the anti-Semitism, to just let the insults roll off her back. But she couldn't. Nor could she ignore the fact that her father's warehouse (now a venue of the House of Blues) had separate bathrooms for each race. Refusing to tolerate Southern intolerance, she headed north to college - 1,500 miles north.

Evans studied art at Boston University. Early on, she says, she felt stifled in the drawing courses; she wasn't interested in spending hours trying to reproduce the perfect egg. "I wanted to be original," Evans says. One teacher suggested switching to art history. Instead she majored in sculpture, earning a bachelor of fine arts. Along the way she met John, whom she married in 1970.

After holding traditional jobs - she teaching school, he working in advertising and then as college professor in Texas - they moved back to the Boston area in 1981 and set about making their living as artists while raising two children.

Evans continued with sculpture, initially working in bronze and later with found objects. One piece includes empty paint tubes and their caps; another uses a stretched dish towel as a base. The sculptures are displayed throughout their spacious home, which the couple designed with the help of an architect.

While her sculptures were exhibited at galleries in New York and at the DeCordova Museum, few of them sold. "Everybody can hang a painting," Evans says. "Everyone has a wall. Not everyone knows what to do with a sculpture."

Meanwhile, demand grew for her husband's paintings, which were promoted by the late New York art dealer Allan Stone (whose stable of artists included Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Wayne Thiebaud). "At least one of us was selling," she says.

Finger painting

In the early '90s, as a lark, Evans began experimenting with oils. Initially, she took a knife and dug into the gobs of paint on her husband's palette and applied it to plywood. "I'd build a painting like I would build a sculpture," she says. Evans played with the paint. "I had nothing to lose," she explains. "In my mind, I was a sculptor." But encouraged by Stone, she soon began to view herself as a painter.

Today, Evans enjoys the commercial success that eluded her before. Her works, which sell for up to $18,000, are displayed in galleries in Atlanta, Boca Raton, Martha's Vineyard, and New Orleans and at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Like the willful Boston University undergrad, she still bristles at artistic conventions. She attacks the canvas with brushes, knives, sticks, anything she can get her hands on - hands included. "If I don't like it, I'll take my hands and smush it. It's all spontaneous. If I couldn't paint that way, if I had to go by some sort of rules, I'd probably shoot myself," she says.

Evans says behind each of her paintings is a story. Recall her description of "Night Watch": She loves to anthropomorphize things, especially houses. Windows become eyes; roofs, hair; a dab of red, a mouth. In "Goin' to the Jazz Fest," a house jauntily cruises across the waves into town. In "Smash Hit," a pair of "totally whacked out" palm trees compare notes after the storm, she explains. "These guys are saying to each other: 'What happened to you?' 'What happened to you?' "

She spends a lot of time thinking about her titles. She says they usually come to her just before she finishes a work. They're usually quirky and possess double, if not triple meanings. As angry as she may be feeling - be it about Katrina or global warming or the Iraq war - she insists that she's an optimist. "I want to emote that life is good, that I want to see the beauty of things," Evans says. "You can find joy if you look for it. You can find the terrible things too, but you shouldn't dwell on them."

Carolyn Evans's work is at the Danforth Museum, Framingham, through Oct. 19. 508-620-0050, www.danforthmuseum.org, www.evansartstudio.com