Utter worked within a small, dynamic group of artists and friends now known as the Fort Worth Circle which was the city’s avant-garde art community during the 1940s and 1950s. Like other members of the circle, Utter found creative inspiration in the allegorical imagery and organic abstractions of European surrealism, which he translated into his own unique visual vocabulary.

Evening Reflections is part of a group of early works that Utter called “embellished forms.” First exhibited in Fort Worth in 1946, these pictures are based loosely on the human figure. Dallas art critic Patricia Peck praised the series for its esoteric imagery, claiming that Utter had produced art that “arouses in the spectator some anonymous understanding that skirts the realm of the literal and lands squarely in the imagination.”

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)