Verse-A-Tell-It

In the poetry collection Verse-A-Tell-It, about love, self-love, and life experiences, author Adrian Ray Evans also painted the art illustrated in the book. Evans was born in a farmhouse in Western Kentucky during the Great Depression. A recovering alcoholic since December 1983, he is retired from his own house painting business, Adrian Custom House Painters of Orlando, Florida, where he lived and worked for forty years. After retirement, he and his wife returned to his hometown of Owensboro, Kentucky in 2012, to be near ailing family members and to spend the remaining years of their lives. The author still uses his brush to please and beautify the world with his oil paintings, creating landscapes, seascapes, stills, and abstracts under the pseudonym “Arts by Adrian R.” Primarily a self-taught artist, several of his paintings have won ribbons. One of his abstract paintings titled “EVIL,” received wide acclaim depicting the attack on the World Trade Center. He has completed over 500 paintings, some of which can be “liked” on Facebook under Adrian Ray Evans. A veteran of the U.S. Navy, Evans served during the Korean Conflict in the early 1950s as a radio operator aboard the USS Fessenden, DER 142. The Fessenden was a World War II destroyer escort, converted into a radar picket ship for the Korean War, when it patrolled a portion of the U.S. Eastern North Atlantic shores. After Korea, it was scuttled in Pearl Harbor Bay to be an artificial reef. Woeful Wisdom (Outskirts Press) was Evans’ first book, which was intended to help other alcoholics by telling about his own experiences and recovery.