A talent WITHOUT LIMITS

There are no limits to how your creativity can be expressed, or to the direction of your career — CHRISTOPHER EVANS

Chris Evans has had a multifaceted career as a landscape painter, portraitist, National Geographicillustrator, and Motion Picture Special Effects Matte Artist. His paintings have been shown in art galleries and museums in the United States and Europe.

The work Chris has done as a matte artist has appeared in over fifty feature films including Titanic, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Jurassic Park, Star Trek, and E. T. Early on in his career, he earned an Oscar nomination for his work on the movie Willow, directed by Ron Howard, and an Emmy Award for the television show The Ewok Adventure.

Teen Herald correspondent Priscilla del Castillo interviewed Chris at his home studio in Bay Shore, New York, where he lives with his wife and young son.

Chris, how did you become an artist?

As a child, I was nurtured by my parents to express myself through drawing and painting, as well as through music. I can remember my dad and grandfather teaching me how to draw animals. And when I was about eight, my parents enrolled me in a Saturday morning art class in our town.

Later, in high school, I joined the school newspaper staff as the cartoonist. I'd illustrate articles and draw cartoons about different issues. I loved doing caricatures of the principal, teachers, and my friends. I had a blast! Later on I also took photographs for the newspaper and wrote articles. I found I had different artistic talents that were fun to put together.

Then, in my senior year, I was taking a physics class but not doing very well. I had straight A's until this class, which just wasn't working for me. With the help of my academic guidance counselor, I was able to drop the class and switch into an art appreciation class. I felt like I was a fish being put back in the water!

The teacher was a great inspiration. He made art come alive to me. We would look at art history: pictures of cave paintings, and modern art, and the old masters, and I loved it! I started doing little copies of Michelangelo paintings. At that time, I was never really conscious that I had an artistic gift. I just loved making art.

That year I saw a public television series called Civilization by Kenneth Clark, an English art historian. In each episode he went to different locations around Europe, and talked about the art. I thought, “Wow! That is so cool.”

So as soon as I graduated from high school, I worked in a clothing store for six months hanging shirts on hangers, and saved up some money. I flew to Europe, got a train pass, and visited the big art museums in Europe — in Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and England.

My family moved from New York to Los Angeles that year, and when I got back from Europe, I applied to the University of California (UCLA) and was accepted there.

Was there any pressure from your family to choose something “practical” to study in college?

I didn't start out as an art major my freshman year, because both sides of the family had the idea that art was not a practical thing to do, at least for a man. You had to have a “real job.”

My dad didn't try to restrict me, but one grandfather told me, “You're very artistically talented. Why don't you go into architecture?” But I really wasn't that interested in architecture. Another family member said, “You should get a job teaching art,” because he taught art and industrial design.

I thought, “Well, maybe I'll study art history and be an art historian.” At least art history was an academic discipline, it seemed to me.

So I started off as an art history major. But, at the same time, I really loved to paint and draw. On the weekends I would go home and do oil paintings. I brought them in to my art history teachers in college, and one of them said, “Wow! Who taught you to paint like this? This is incredible!” He told me, “Just be an art major and don't worry about anything. Enjoy yourself, and everything will take care of itself.”

That helped liberate me to study what I loved. I had a growing awareness that I had a gift for art, and I realized that I didn't have to worry about where I was going to go with the gift, I should just follow it. And that's what I did. I became an art major.

How did Christian Science help you in your career path as an artist?

I had been going to a Christian Science Sunday School since I was a child, but when I was about sixteen I really started appreciating Christian Science. It had become important to me — not only to my parents, my family, and other church people. I didn't go to Sunday School every week, but in high school I started reading the Christian Science Bible Lesson almost every day. I really got into seeing what it had to say, and how it could be practical in my life.

The wonderful thing is that Christian Science helped me put aside fear about my future, and a feeling of limitation. I found that individual progress in life — whatever our nationality or religion — comes when we open our thought to the infinite possibilities we have from God.

There's a great idea in Science and Health: “A knowledge of the Science of being develops the latent abilities” — abilities are like talents — “and possibilities of man. It extends the atmosphere of thought, giving mortals access to broader and higher realms. It raises the thinker into his native air of insight and perspicacity” (p. 128).

Any artist is a thinker, not just a mindless paintbrush.

How did you get your first job?

After undergraduate school, I got a Master of Fine Arts degree. Then it came down to whether I was going to teach, or find some other job.

I painted some portraits and found that I wasn't earning enough money to pay my share of the rent and was also feeling isolated and lonely. I became very fearful and thought I had come to sort of a dead end.

All along, though, I had been studying the Bible Lesson and going to church. I was also teaching Sunday School to high-school students. My family lived a block away from a Christian Science Reading Room in Los Angeles. Every morning, before going into my studio in a little garage, I'd go to the Reading Room and read the Lesson, and I would pray. It was a critical point in my life.

From the Bible Lessons I had learned that a desire can be a prayer. But it isn't about “I want this. I want that.” It's often about desiring to give. And I wanted to use the gift of art, which I loved, in a way that was good for me and good for others.

I remember thinking, “If art is not really practical, and not that important, then I'm willing to give it up.” I was willing to put art behind me as a career and do whatever else seemed right. Maybe I'd do architecture; maybe I'd go into sales or some other business unrelated to art.

Around that time, I went to see the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back. I noticed that in the Cloud City scene, the city and the clouds in the background were paintings. I had done some cloud paintings before, so I thought, “Wow! I can do some cloud paintings for the next Star Wars movie. I'll just volunteer.”

When the movie credits rolled up, I noticed the name of one of the art directors. I wrote it down on a little scrap of paper with a message to myself saying, “Contact so-and-so at The Studios.” I didn't even know which studio.

I felt this impulsion to contact them and say, “I have this talent, and I can paint clouds.” I honestly wasn't even thinking about a job and a paycheck.

I knew that George Lucas was the director of Star Wars, and I found out that his company was basically top secret. But a friend of mine was able to find the com pany's Hollywood address, and she gave it to me. I went there with a page of slides of my paintings. It was an old brick warehouse with a plain wood door, and no number. I opened the door and inside was a huge, beautiful office with sky-lights, tropical plants, and people coming and going.

I walked up to the receptionist and said, “I'm an artist and I'd like to work for this company. Here are my pictures.” After she took them to the art director, she said to me, “Come back in an hour.”

So I went back an hour later. The art director came out and said, “It's a miracle that you came to us today. Just this morning, we got the message from Industrial Light & Magic that they need a new artist in San Francisco.” And they arranged for an interview with me the following week.

The interview was at another secret warehouse. As I was escorted through its enormous rooms, I saw huge paintings that were the backgrounds of the snow battle in The Empire Strikes Back. In another room, was the Imperial Star Destroyer model just leaning against the wall, in another place the Death Star, and a puppet of Yoda. And then I saw the very painting that I had noticed in the Star Wars movie — the background painting of Cloud City on glass.

After the interview, I drove back to LA, and a week later they offered me a job as an apprentice matte artist — someone who creates paintings that are incorporated into the background scenes of movies. The story is still amazing to me!

Where did your career go after that?

I loved my work at Industrial Light & Magic, but the extraordinary demands of that job left very little time for exploring my own artistic ideas. So after eight years there, I decided to go free lance, which gave me some personal time and led me to a variety of very interesting jobs for Disney studios and National Geographic magazine. Over the past twenty years, my work has taken me to remote volcanic islands, ancient ruins in tropical jungles, temples in Thailand, and archeological digs in Israel.

These days I spend most of my time working on my own paintings. There's a gallery in California that sells my work. I also work part-time from my home computer for a company called MatteWorld Digital that creates digital matte shots for movies.

What are your plans for the future?

I feel that God is directing me, along with everybody else. And I feel like I'm trying to listen for that guidance. An important thing, as I've learned throughout my career, is to be open-minded.

A great realization I've had, is that my creativity and artistic talent could only be a gift from God. It's not something that I chose to generate from within myself. God has given me this gift to create something beautiful, or to communicate beauty in some way, and I know that His wisdom guides me, and each of us, in how our skills can be used best. God wouldn't give us a perfect, useful gift, and deprive us of a way to share it with others.

The big lesson, for me, has been to overcome the fear, or the self-doubt, that would prevent me from going through the door of infinite possibilities that is open to each of us.