Matched Pair

“From the very beginning, I felt more horse than human.”

Lynda Evans, Artist

“I could neigh before I could talk,” says Lynda Evans. And she ran and neighed on a green of the golf course near her home in an affluent, country club community in Knoxville, Tennessee. She also drew horses at every opportunity, having been born, as she put it, with a crayon in her hand screaming “Why?”

Today she is still settling into her studio/home in Santa Fe after moving here this spring. At age 70, her life to date has been complex enough for a book, but it has some luminous highlights that seem helpful in understanding the reason for this stalled moment in history.

THE FIRST TWO DECADES

Lynda’s talent is obvious in the charcoal drawing above, and beginning as a child, she wanted to develop it. However, her high school art teacher said, “Don’t come back to class until you can stop drawing horses.” She hoped to major in art at the University of Tennessee, but her father said, “You’re not going to college to be bright.  You’re going to get the right husband.” And her drawing professor said, “I hate that you’re a woman. Study your art history. Women don’t make it in the arts.”

Lynda deliberately flunked out of college after her freshman year and went to Washington, D.C., to intern in Congress. After six months, she returned to Knoxville with an idea. She enlisted department heads in fine arts, art education, and human services in helping her develop a curriculum for a triple major. It took five years to complete the degree.

While she was doing a course practicum in a psychoeducational center in Memphis, she also worked as a minister of education for St. John’s Methodist Church. It had been failing, and she became a part of a pastoral team that developed a home study Bible education program and a Sunday “Celebration of Life” that included the arts. Attendance rose to standing room only, but the regional bishop fired Lynda due to “inadequate credentials.”

Lynda enjoyed her ministry with the church, but while studying in Knoxville, she had a mystical experience that totally altered her life and religious perspective. She and her friends were dancing and singing around a bonfire in a field of daisies–no drugs or alcohol involved–when suddenly everything went into slow motion for Lynda. She stood still in a state of rapture, everyone and everything sparkling with energy, her heart full of love, joy, and peace. It was an experience of oneness, love without judgment, very different from the tone of  the Word of God in church.

Lynda turned to Campus Crusade to understand the experience, which she described as an inner knowing of reality that surpassed reason. She was told that she had been “reborn.” She proceeded to become a “raging fundamentalist,” she said humorously, and when she completed her undergraduate degree, she moved to Boston to pursue a master’s degree in theology at the evangelical Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary.

However, cracks formed in the foundation of her ministerial commitment. As a result of her personal experience with what is referred to as “the Divine within,” she continued to question the right of men to rule through “the sanctity of reason.” Her mystical experience in the field of daisies suggested that feminine spirituality had more to do with the simple knowing of the heart. As a result, upon graduation, Lynda declined to be ordained and returned to Knoxville.

THE INNER DRUMMER

From that point on, Lynda followed her inner drummer. She began to pursue a career in art, first working in a gallery and then establishing her own business as an art consultant building private, corporate, and contract art collections and supporting artists in various ways. In fact, she would continue to work in the arts in a variety of ways in Georgia, Connecticut, and North Carolina as well as Tennessee until she was 64.

However,  a turning point had come with a “committed partnership” in 1995 when she was 45, and her passion for horses and for creating her own art reignited. She acquired two horses, one a beautiful brown Arabian named Baskos Khostar, and a year later, she had a life-changing moment in the studio of an artist friend, Kathleen Morris of New Mexico.

Baskos Khostar

Kathleen offered Lynda a canvas and materials to play around with for a while. When Kathleen looked at the results, she exclaimed, “Oh, my God! You’re a painter!” Kathleen thus became the “birth mother” of Lynda’s artist. She proceeded to study with a number of internationally renowned teachers, including Robert Sherer and Hugh O’Donnell. Over the years since, she has specialized in charcoal drawings of horses, as in the image of Baskos Khostar, who became her “muse.”

In her 40s, many of Lynda’s dreams were coming true, and she also had another mystical experience. Having developed partial paralysis and chronic pain from a number of riding accidents, she finally sought relief from a Cherokee shaman named Rocking Bear near Asheville, North Carolina. During a healing ceremony, she suddenly had a vision of a white horse charging directly at her. As it struck, merging into her body, every chakra opened, and she was healed. “Your power has returned,” said Rocking Bear. Her vision below of Epona, the Celtic mother goddess, certainly evokes Lynda’s healing moment.

Epona

By the time Lynda turned 50, the experience of dreams coming true had come to an end. Her relationship failed, and she couldn’t provide for her two horses and had to find them new homes. Baskos Khostar mysteriously died six months after getting resettled, and it would be two years before she returned in spirit to revitalize Linda’s art. It wasn’t until 2014 when Lynda was 64 that she was finally able to focus on her art full-time, and then she packed up and moved to Santa Fe in 2020 as the city was on the threshold of a pandemic-imposed shutdown.

AND NOW THE PRESENT

What lies before Lynda now, with waning tourism as well as a weakened economy shrinking the huge art market here, is unknown. In this difficult moment, though, I imagine a special significance in her arrival.

We are experiencing a steady awakening to an imbalance in civilization whose cultivation began over a thousand years ago. It has emerged in part from the establishment of masculine dominion through the pursuit of wealth and power and in league with organized religion. This has been established as “normal,” and many want to go back to it in spite of all the injustices becoming daily more apparent. However, the day I began working on this post, an essay appeared suggesting an opportunity for humanity to advance beyond this juncture.

It was written by Dr. Sharon Blackie, a renowned British writer, psychologist, and teacher of Celtic mythology, and the title is “Becoming Who We Are.” She poses a question: What if we chose in a soul state to be born to bring “a unique gift that only we can express in this world, in this place, at this time.” She sees this as an alchemical moment, and our gifts could enable us to participate with the cosmos “in its journey of becoming.”

Lynda faced many obstacles in trying to bring her gift as an artist into full expression. Many of these were created by the masculine enforcing the cultural and religious mandates that have stood in the way of full development of feminine potential. However, the masculine has also been disadvantaged by the perpetual role of provider and the conflict-invoked role of warrior. If we are to “lift” as a species, the experience of becoming our true selves must be shared by both sexes.

CONCLUSION

Lynda Evans

As she said, Lynda Evans had a plan in coming to Santa Fe; now she doesn’t. Nevertheless, she believes that she was drawn here for a reason, and as she proceeds to establish the Lynda Evans Studio here, she does not stand in judgment of this disruption or express impatience with it.

If, as Sharon Blackie suggests, we may each have been born into this time to share a gift that will help with a new “becoming,” Lynda’s art seems a powerful example of the like. I will not be surprised if it invokes some kind of response that could become the topic of another post.