JOHN BORDEN EVANS
White: A Season in the Life of John Borden Evans is a quiet meditation on place, memory, and the rhythms that shape a life well-lived. Set in rural Virginia, the film draws us into the world of painter John Borden Evans and his wife, Beth Neville, who have spent more than three decades in an old farmhouse passed down through Beth’s family. This isn’t just the backdrop to their lives — it’s the center of their story.
The house, with its drafty winters and lived-in warmth, is as much a character as the people who inhabit it. Here, their children were born. Here, they share meals, split wood, tend the stove. And here, John paints — quietly, deliberately, season after season — finding in the bare winter branches and shifting light the geometry of meaning. White, for him, is not purity or absence but texture, resistance, a surface to be worked and revealed.
Beth, once a clothier and set designer, now sings in the church choir she directs. She speaks of sewing jackets with the precision of architecture — each line and seam needing to fall just so — a philosophy not far from John’s approach to his canvases. Together, they live a life shaped by faith, labor, and care, in which art is not separate from the everyday but deeply rooted in it.
White is not a film about painting, per se. It’s about time — how it settles in a place, how it moves through a marriage, how it’s marked on canvas, and in the creak of a floorboard, and in the snow that quietly returns each year.
"White: A Season in the Life of John Borden Evans is a close look at an intriguing couple who chartered their course and made you envious." - Julian Bond | Washington, DC
"The whole thing is so skillfully woven together -- John's quiet voice, silence, and the music. It creates a wonderful, wondering mood. The stars. and the cows. and trees." - Alice Parker | Composer
"The cinematography is stunning. The notion that the cinematographer can compose an artwork that includes the painting, the artist, and the artist's life is compelling. It sets you an artistic goal different from the artist and challenges you to balance your eye (and ear) against his so the audience can assess your achievement. The artist we hear has a very simple voice; at the beginning, it's impossible to know where this simplicity comes from, but in the end, I think we see simplicity as a choice, especially if we know that his wife makes clothes for Tom Wolfe. So in that arc, the voice changes from the beginning to the end because we start to hear it differently. By reaching beyond the artwork to the life, Montes-Bradley also enables the viewer to consider what of the artist's life gets into the art and what doesn't—so you are questioning formalist approaches to art without neglecting form. There's more to be said about simplicity, about the paring down, paring down to spiritual essence, and the director´s use of the shape-note singing keeps that theme alive as the film progresses. The color? Against white, the art, the scenes from South America, and the hats. This one is best, I think, of the Montes-Bradley´s that I've seen, not a wasted frame." - Jeffrey Plank | UVA
"My first impression is BRAVO, and my second is superb. Your camera work is exquisite, and I felt you captured something important about John and Beth-Neville. I'm looking forward to seeing the film about the next person you chose to profile." David A. Maurer | The Daily Progress
AWARDS
Best Documentary, Richmond International Film Festival 2015
Best Documentary, International Documentary Festival of Ierapetra, 2015