WAIN EVANS

A life-long interest in the out-of-doors led Wain Evans to his twenty year career in wildlife conservation and a photography career. He now has a developing photographic record of remarkable images of 3,000-4,000 year old shamanistic rock art produced by the first of the Native American cultures to inhabit southeast Utah and northeast Arizona. With BS and MS degrees from New Mexico State University in Wildlife and Fisheries Management, and a PhD from Texas A&M in Wildlife Science, Evans is clearly at home in the great outdoors. Wildlife photography and other outdoor imagery led to his current passion of creating large, high-resolution photographs of the little-seen rock art.

Evans' images are of rock art created in the Native American Barrier Canyon Style (BCS) found in the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau. The original artists belonged to the Archaic Culture of hunter-gatherers inhabiting the region for 7,000 years beginning about 8,400 years ago. BCS art strongly suggests shamanistic origins and is widely regarded as the first and most powerful of the several styles developed in the region. Most BCS rock art seen today is thought to be at least 3-4 thousand years old.

Evans' produces his extraordinary pictures as dye-sublimation prints. This printing process represents a new medium for preserving photographs by infusing dyes directly into specially coated aluminum sheets. Because the image is infused into the surface rather than onto it, the image takes on greater luminescence, clarity and sharpness of detail compared to printing on paper or canvas. Dye-sublimation prints are highly durable, waterproof, weatherproof, scratch-resistant and are easily cleaned with any commercial glass cleaner. As with any print, direct sunlight should be avoided due to the color fade that UV rays can cause. Even so, color retention tests of dye-sublimation prints vs. long-lasting photography paper found them to be two to four times more color retentive.