Born in Cardiff, Merlyn Evans grew up near Glasgow, and from 1927 studied at the Glasgow School of Art. In 1930, he exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy and the Glasgow Institute of Fine Art. Having won a Travelling Scholarship, he gained a free place at the Royal College of Art, and studied Carving as well as other media. He produced etchings and aquatints, and sculpture in marble carvings and bas-reliefs. His dedication to painting however is expressed in his continued productions even during his service in the War.

In his introduction to the catalogue of the 1988 exhibition at The Mayor Gallery and the Redfern Gallery in London, Mel Gooding wrote:

Few artists are as critically conscious as Evans was of the fact that art is a means...by which we may picture and make visible those hidden relationships, correspondences and parallels...Evans wrote “I proceed from the general to the particular, from the abstract to the concrete”...His imagination was of a philosophical temper, finding forms of expression that were essentially metaphorical, presentations that have about them a theatrical air of ritual or ceremony, an intense formality. His paintings and prints even at their most rigorously abstract...have always a subject, they refer always to something beyond, something encountered in the human world.