Sensitive Sculptor

At age eight, sculptor Elaine Brockbank Evans began to take her budding artistic feelings seriously. She took all available opportunities by sketching on the cover of this and the backside of that. One of her preferred surfaces was the interior of her bedroom closet door, which increased her ability to shade and add depth to her creations.

Her parents, well aware of her talents, desired to demonstrate this work to the painter John Fairbanks so that she could be enrolled in private art lessons. But the closet door was too cumbersome to remove for a display. Instead, her parents took a small bust of Ulysses that Elaine had created after reading Homer’s Odyssey.

Instead of being enrolled in painting classes, young Elaine found herself taking lessons from John’s son, the sculptor Avard Fairbanks. Her early training with him lasted one year, and she later studied with him at the University of Oregon in Eugene and then at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

The Church commissioned Sister Evans to create a sculpture of Adam and Eve for the 1964 World’s Fair. The sculpture now stands in the North Visitors’ Center on Temple Square in Salt Lake City. In 1975 Sister Evans sculpted a work titled Christ and the Little Children, which can be seen in the John Taylor Building of Religion on the Ricks College campus. She has also designed work for a Berkeley, California, meetinghouse and other Church buildings.

Says Sister Evans, “I have never desired to do any work in sculpture or painting that did not have spiritual significance. I believe that the mission of art is to uplift the soul, refine the thinking and behavior, and cultivate the joy of appreciation.”

Now 93 years of age, Sister Evans still travels to visit her family and to touch up her art, which appears in buildings nationwide. She is a member of the Berkeley First Ward, Oakland California Stake.—Yvonne Hawkins Bent, El Cerrito, California