About the artist:

From an Article in the Jewish Chronicle from 1966 --- TEAM WORK—In art as in life, Mr. and Mrs. Yale (Evelyn Mitchell) Solomon put their talents together. Yale Solomon uses his gift for working with wood to create frames for his artist-wife's paintings. THE guest in the spare bedroom in the house of Yale and Evelyn Mitchell Solomon goes out tomorrow for three months volunteer work at the Pittsburgh Blood Bank. The Solomons' permanent house guest and Blood Bank volunteer is not, however, a real person. It is the painting and graphic art—21 pieces—from Evelyn's easel set up in the bedroom studio in the Solomons' Stanton Heights house that Evelyn is lending, first, from August 6 to September 10 to Gateway Four Blood Bank donor station, and then from September 12 to October 30 to Oakland donor station at 3601 Fifth Ave. Her art has had a permanent place in Evelyn's life ever since she won special permission to enter children's art classes in Chicago even though she was still under their age limit. And -her life always has a dynamic reciprocal role in her art. "I think women are close to to nature," says Evelyn. "I'm very influenced by nature. I use alot of natural forms in my work." Married since 1946 to Yale Solomon, a physical chemist at Westinghouse, Evelyn integrates with her art the self-discipline of being a family woman, the mother of three children—Barry, 16; Paula, 13; and Roy, 8—as acceptingly as she accommodates the practices of both commercial and fine art in her profession. "Fine-artists make their own assignments, but I also like meeting the challenge of an assigned problem," Evelyn says. Before Roy was in school full time and before the Solomons moved into the house with the spare bedroom, Evelyn adjusted her art life into the time and space frame of family life. Now the children have adjusted to Evelyn's art again being a full day's work for her at her easel in the spare bedroom and in her work with George Nama in the print workshop at the Arts and Crafts Center. Barry and Paula and Roy also learn something about both art and life from seeing their father turn his hobby of refinishing old pieces of furniture ("We're the only house on the street that 'receives' from the Salvation Army," they tease him) to designing and making the frames for his wife's paintings. And Evelyn never stops furthering her knowledge of her craft. Despite having taken the second prize in oil paintingpin the 1966 New Horizon show at Bellevue, Pa., plus an honorable mention, "I put away my oils three years ago,'" says Evelyn. "Now I work in acrylics, as I would in oil. I felt very at home in acrylics. It seemed to extend my horizons." Evelyn still draws with anything' —pencil, ink, magic-markers—and still works in watercolors,butnow she takes old watercolors, tears them up and puts them together again in a collage to create a new sense in arrangement of forms as a preliminary sketch to painting. "I think I am now heading toward a new and, for me, more dimensional art medium," Evelyn says, describing her work with relief painting where a modeling effect is combined with painting. Her subject matter develops as her own natural personal comment on her world, as in her relief painting "They" (the "they" of "they-are-wearing-it-this-year" conformity) or in her print, "Facade." By Katherine Kibbee, Chronicle Staff Writer