April 26, 2025 at Pastine Projects, San Francisco

INTRODUCTION
Francesca Pastine:   Richard Whittaker, as many of you know, is the founding editor of works & conversations magazine, which he’s published since 1998. For the last 15 years, he also served as the West Coast editor of Parabola magazine. I thought Richard would be a perfect fit for a dialogue with Eva Bovenzi. His interviews often illuminate the very heart of the creative process, allowing artists to reflect deeply on their practices and the fundamental impulses behind their work.

Similar to Richard’s devotion to authenticity, Eva’s visual language is deeply personal, poetic, and resistant to easy paraphrase. Drawing from an eclectic well of influences—Spanish manuscript painting, Romanesque and Byzantine frescoes, Tantric diagrams, Native American ceremonial objects—Bovenzi gravitates toward art forms that strive for spiritual understanding across cultures

The works in The Traffic Between Heaven and Earth were shaped during a month-long residency at Arte Studio Ginestrelle in Assisi in 2022. There, the frescoes of Giotto and Pietro Lorenzetti in the Basilica di San Francesco—already layered with the weight of centuries—became a daily encounter, almost a ritual. Each day, Bovenzi visited the basilica to experience the shifting light on color and form. Over time, she cultivated a deeper understanding of the frescoes and the profound narratives within them. This slow look became a kind of communion.

In response, she offers her own meditation on those images and their spirit—not as a direct translation, but as personal meditation on the timeless dialogue between the sacred and the profane, where the ephemeral and the eternal converge.

Eva received her MMFA from CCA in Oakland, and is represented by me, Pastine Projects, and Michael Warren Contemporary in Denver. She has exhibited widely in galleries, museums and non-profit spaces in the United States and internationally, including the Berkeley and Oakland Art Museums, the Achenbach Foundation, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Biennale Internazionale in Florence, and Assisi International Contemporary Art – and now I’ll leave the stage to Richard and Eva.

Eva Bovenzi:   Thank you.

Richard Whittaker:   Thank you, Francesca. All right. It’s great to see all of you here, and a pleasure to reconnect. My wife warned me not to wear these glasses [one ear piece missing], but I thought, it can be sort of an art thing, right? [laughter, then turning to Eva] How’s it going so far for you today?

Eva:   I was a little stunned walking out of the elevator. I sort of thought people were going to be standing around with drinks, and here they are all assembled. I’m trying to gather myself.                 

Richard:   Okay, that’s good. How do you feel about the summary Francesca just read?

Eva:   Accurate.

Richard:   Good. [to the audience] Well, I must say, I hardly know this wonderful artist.

Eva:   We met briefly a few weeks ago.

Richard:   Thank you for remembering. And like so many others, I love your title for this work, The Traffic Between Heaven and Earth. It’s an amazing thing to ponder. Now in her introduction, Francesca mentioned a number of subjects in your earlier work, and I wish you would say a little bit about some of those subjects - whichever ones come to mind.

Eva:   You mean the sources?

Richard:   Yes. Francesca mentioned that you’ve worked with some indigenous imagery and objects, for instance. It all sounded very interesting.

Eva:   Well, for quite a long time I’ve been looking at the art of various spiritual traditions, because I feel that it’s pure, in a way.  It’s art language used to describe a belief system. It certainly doesn’t involve the individual artist’s ego in any way—most of this art was developed anonymously. So, I’ve been looking at Tantric art, which is often trying to diagram the universe. Looking at Spanish manuscript painting, which I just love—it’s very early. The flatness of the space in much of this art—especially early Christian and traditional East Indian art—is abstract in a way that looks modern to me, the flattening of the space, the color.

As for Native American work: I spent summers in Southern Colorado for about twenty years, and was able to go down to Santa Fe and Taos, or up to Denver, to look at the indigenous art collections there. I was always overwhelmed by the beauty of the work, the care in the making of it—and again, the abstraction and symbolism of the art. So, I guess those are my sources.

I don’t look to contemporary art for inspiration, and I haven’t for quite a while. I look to art history. I look to the period when people were using art to express a belief system, because I think we don’t truly subscribe to “universal belief systems” anymore.

I mean what makes the art I’m talking about so appealing is that it’s the language of a culture to which everybody was subscribing. If you think about early Christian art coming out of Europe, for instance—I mean that was it. That was the religion. That was the art. Those were the stories that everybody believed, and that’s true all of those old cultures. It has a sort of a freshness and authenticity that’s very appealing—and that feeds me.

So, I’m trying to make work that’s kind of a distillation and a digestion of all of those sources and shapes and colors and use-of-space, and trying to make work that sort of points people in the direction of meaning, or brings up the question of meaning.

Richard:   It’s so encouraging for me to hear an artist freely declare an interest in the search for meaning.

Eva:   That’s been your life-long search as well. Right?

Richard:   Pretty much, yes. Have you had the good fortune to have any personal relationships with any representatives of say, Native American Art, or Greek Orthodox icons, or Tantric images—people making the work itself?               

Eva:   No, I can’t say I have. I look at a lot of books and go to museums whenever I have a chance to see the work in person. That’s what I do.                     

Richard:   I’m intrigued by your saying that that work feeds you. Can you say anything more about that?

Eva:   I think that during the Renaissance, Western art underwent a big change, where the individual artist became very important. Even though people were still dealing with the same Christian subject matter, secular subjects were beginning to be depicted as well. The emphasis shifted away from using art to talk about meaning, to more talking about the artist. So, although I can go look at beautiful Renaissance frescoes and even Post-Renaissance art, the closer we get to our time, the less interested I am, because I see the kind of tricks that the artist is pulling out of his bag, usually.

I feel like we’re getting farther away from that original purpose of the art, which is to illuminate a world view. That doesn’t sound right exactly, because clearly, Renaissance and Post-Renaissance art is illuminating a world view, it’s just a world view that I’m less interested in.

Richard:   An interesting thing for me in what you’re saying is that not only would this earlier art, as I imagine it, illuminate a world view, but also worlds of experience that can be realized through spiritual disciplines—and with the help of a spiritual community. So, I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about how these world views, are actual worlds for these people? Is that a question for you?

Eva:   Yes! If you do go to Northern New Mexico and visit some of the pueblos there—there are still dances you can go to—you understand that this religion was borne right here in this place— with this amazing blue sky over you. You’re high up, with this sense of space and light, and all these objects and dances came from being here and having this very specific relationship to the Earth. And to me, that’s incredibly powerful.

Richard:   Yes. It is to me, as well. What’s the name of that pueblo up on a plateau?

Eva:   Acoma.

Richard:   Right. Have you been there?

Eva:   Yeah, several times.

Richard:   Would you say something about your experiences with Acoma?

Eva:   I have a small collection of black and white Acoma pottery, though it’s more recent. It’s not the older pottery.  Acoma itself, at this point, is kind of a museum because you take a bus there and have to go up with a guide. I think there’s only a couple of people who stay there all the time. Mostly they come up and spread their pottery out. It’s gorgeous, it’s totally gorgeous. In a way, Acoma is a little bit like Venice, strange as that sounds—it’s someplace you visit as a museum.  But certainly the landscape is amazing. When you’re up there, you’re looking out over this incredible mesa.

Richard:   [to an audience response] Have you been to Acoma?

Audience member:  Oh, my God! It’s amazing!

Richard:  Yes! [laughs, turning to Eva] Okay. Let’s go to Assisi. You went for a residency there?

Eva:   Yes. It was a residency. We were there for a month. (I was there with my Irish friend, Austin McQuinn. We’d met on a residency in Spain in 1996. So we’re old, old friends.) There were some work tables, and the great part was that it was right in the middle of medieval Assisi. It was just a ten-minute walk to the Basilica.

Richard:   It sounds amazing. So tell us about your experience there.

Eva:   I remember the first few days…  I would look out my window and think, “I’m living in a medieval town.” I just couldn’t believe it. There were narrow, cobblestone streets, and it was very beautiful. And Assisi, even though it does have many tourists, still has a sort of a vitality of its own as a spiritual mecca. There are groups of monks and nuns who come there to on pilgrimage, and many small convents and monasteries. It’s not just a tourist place. It has its own spirit.

Austin and I started going to the Basilica almost every day. We would go at around noon, when the tourists would start to thin out going to lunch, and we’d often find ourselves there just about alone. So I had the amazing privilege of just looking at these frescoes at leisure, being able to revisit them day after day and say, “Did you notice that?” And, “Today I really saw that thing.”

I think I’ve told this story before, but as an abstract artist, I’d see the abstraction in the way the space was structured. Austin has been more of a—I can’t say “figurative” artist, he’s a performance / installation artist. But it’s always centered around the body, and he was brought up Irish Catholic. So, he was seeing the narratives. And when I’d say, “Look at the way those shapes are just all clumped together against that shape,” that was sort of a new way for him to look at it. By the end of the month, he had turned his binoculars around and was seeing that sort of structure. Whereas he was educating me in the fine points of Catholicism and what some of the symbology was.

By the end of the month, I was looking at those scenes of the Passion and thinking, “This is a very poignant story. I see the sorrow—it’s not just something I 'know' about—I see it. I see how it’s depicted. And I see what it must mean to people who truly embrace this narrative."

Richard:   Isn’t that so interesting, and so central? My wife happens to be studying early Christian icons and she’s made trips to many very old churches. I don’t know how much you’ve looked at these.

Eva:   A lot.       

Richard:   So you probably know how in the early centuries there were greater differences in how the holy figures were portrayed, and those icons often feel more alive and real somehow.

Eva:   Before they became more formalized?

Richard:   Yes. Do you have any…?

Eva:  …No. I don’t think I could add to that.

Richard:   It’s very interesting to me how the willingness to spend more time in front of a painting—or something that you want to look at—how that opens up new territory. Ordinarily, almost nobody does that, as you were describing earlier. So, could you talk about some of the most meaningful moments you experienced in spending so much time in front of those frescos and paintings?

Eva:   Well, my favorite part of the Basilica was the lower cathedral. The upper cathedral has frescoes by Giotto of San Francesco’s life. The lower cathedral has Giotto frescoes of the first part of Christ’s life—the Nativity, the Flight into Egypt—then there’s Lorenzetti on the other side with the Passion. And the ceiling is Giotto.

There’s a beautiful vaulted ceiling. Four panels: the three Franciscan vows—Chastity, Obedience, and Poverty. Then the fourth panel shows St. Francis ascending into heaven. So those became my favorite things to look at. And I got lots of stiff necks from looking up like this [mimes].

The backgrounds are gold. So they changed with the light all day long from being like a trumpet blast to being very muted. I started noticing all these details—I wish I had some images with me. The panel that depicts Poverty shows an old, crone-like woman in rags with a patched robe and thorns. She is marrying Saint Francis, and Christ is blessing them. Looking at the colors, and the detail, in her robe became a favorite for me of this whole thing.

That’s, I think, when I started to really focus on this idea of The Traffic Between Heaven and Earth—because in each one of these frescoes, there were angels coming down, devils being cast into Hell. There were people praying. Francis was receiving a stigmata through a ray that came from Heaven. So there’s all this back and forth. All this incredible activity between the celestial sphere and Earth. And a little bit of Hell, as well.  I thought, “Wow, this is amazing!”

Richard:   As I’m listening, what occurred to me was your statement earlier that, “I’m not interested in contemporary art, particularly.” Often I’m not either, to be honest. And what you just described so well—those images are metaphors for what was happening, potentially, for individuals and reflect profound depths held to be real, as you said—that reflect the narratives of the culture, of the Catholic Church in this case.

And maybe I’m mistaken, but I think some there’s something in the air today, some readiness to reconsider some kinds of spiritual narratives. I mean, after the Post-Modern critique all the grand narratives were out the window. Then art got “smart”—like, “Let’s wink” as with, say, Jeff Coons. But what you’re describing are visual depictions from the world of experience that I feel we’re cut off from in contemporary life. And we’re suffering from some deep absence.

Eva:   Yes, I agree.

Richard:   You relate to what I’m saying?

Eva:   Yes, very much so. That would be a parallel discussion I would love to have with you some day.  In terms of “something in the air: I’m seeing a fair amount of what you might describe as “nouveau psychedelic” imagery being done by younger artists. Rainbow colors and mandala-like forms. “Trippy” as the original psychedelic artists would say. But to return to the subject of art: I do want to clarify that it’s not that I’m not interested in contemporary art, I’m just not fed by it, on a whole.

Richard:   Fair enough. Some of it’s good. I mean—to get way up there—there’s James Turrell’s work.

Eva:   Yes. But much of contemporary art, frankly, doesn’t interest me. That’s not a blanket statement, okay? I respond to some things.

Richard:   I agree. There are some contemporary artists who speak very deeply to me. So it’s unfair to make it a blanket statement, for sure. Now, I know from talking with you earlier, that you have a 25-year relationship with the practice of Zen. So is fair to ask you to reflect about how the art practice and the Zen practice occupy you, feed each other—or not? It’s just an open question about those two.

Eva:   Yes. It’s a good question. Well, it took me a long time to come out of the closet as a Zen Buddhist. I mean, I think I was practicing for maybe almost ten years before I would even describe myself as a Buddhist. I think a lot of it was just the lack of approbation that I sensed from the art world. Like I was already out on a limb with my art, I felt, and then to add an avowed spiritual practice, on top of it? It seemed like, “Okay, now I’m really niche-able. Now you can just push me over there.”

But I’m out of the closet now. I have been practicing Zen for close to 25 years. I don’t think Buddhism has directly influenced my imagery, though I certainly appreciate Japanese art, especially.  I think there’s a sense of space in my work that might be reflected in Buddhism, and fed by it. And breath. I mean, the more I’ve painted the more I feel that I need to have breath in an image.

If an image is very claustrophobic—all figure, for instance, no ground, all figure—I can’t work that way. I have to have air and space in my work, and I love looking at work that also has that—James Turrell would be an amazing example of that.

Richard:   Yes.

Eva:   And then there’s discipline. There’s focus. There’s quietness. I mean, I think I’ve always valued coming to the present, even before I started practicing Buddhism. Coming to the present; being in the present. It’s always a value for me. And that’s what Buddhism is all about—just living in the now.

Richard:   Yes.

Eva:   And I feel that if my work can help bring people to the now, that’s good. That’s enough. It’s trying to bring people to the now. Trying to just slow you down, and give you an experience in front of the painting—a bodily, emotional, spiritual, whatever—some sort of experience that you wouldn’t have unless you stopped there.

Richard:   And you mentioned breath earlier. That’s so important because, in one’s practice, breath is so central - right?

Eva:   That’s it for Soto Zen. That’s it.

Richard:   Well, this is a topic that’s probably too esoteric, unless you have a meditation practice where you’re willing to get off the smart phone or computer or radio, and be with myself… stuck with myself, right? Then I began to see what a mechanism of thoughts and inner noise I am. And I don’t want to be there. Right? So to be there enough to start discovering breath, and how sometimes it’s not open… Well, I have a bit of a practice, so I’ve gone on a bit there.

But I’m curious about when you were young. What were the parts of your life that led you to where you are now as an artist? What are the roots of that?

Eva:   Well, I’m an only child. I grew up in a small town in the Midwest in the 1950s, and it was very lonely. We didn’t live around other kids. I was alone most of the time, and I learned how to entertain myself. I drew a lot and I played piano—and I knew I wasn’t meant to be where I was. I grew up as a lonely, oddball-kind of kid. And I think that’s your basic footprint for being an artist. Isn’t it?

So gee, I wanted to have experiences. I was playing classical music quite seriously, but as my dad said, you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in a practice room. And I knew that. Being an artist, you’re allowed to have experiences; you seek them out. You seek out interesting people. You seek out adventure. At least that was my definition.

Richard:   You put it so well. What were some of the adventures that are most memorable?

Eva:   I spent five months traveling through South America in 1978. Half of that was by myself. My first husband and I traveled seven months across Europe and North Africa in 1970. So I had these experiences when the world was less touristed. I mean, Morocco—at that point, you felt like you were stepping back into the Bible; people were still wearing traditional clothing. So I had many travel experiences.

Richard:   I’m struck by your courage there. I mean, I’d be scared to do some of that. Where did you get that? Tell us a little bit about your parents, if you don’t mind.             

Eva:   Well, I should mention that, especially, they were both very supportive of the arts. They’re Italian-Americans and there was always opera on; there were art prints on the walls. My mother was always feeding me books. So I grew up in that kind of atmosphere. But they, especially my mother, were incredibly protective. So I just busted out. I started college in ’65 and I got married in ’68. So I think it was like, “If I don’t do this, I’m going to suffocate on some level. I’ve got to find a life.”

Richard:   And at that time, you played piano also?

Eva:   I really stopped playing piano when I was in college, because I couldn’t study and play. And I’ve started again just in the last couple of years.

Richard:   How is that for you?

Eva:   It’s great. It’s great. It’s like coming full circle. It’s like discovering a part of myself that I just left behind. So I’m really, really happy.

Richard:   Coming back to the piano, what kind of music are working on?

Eva:   Classical. I’m playing some Brahms and some Beethoven, Bach. I’m starting some Shostakovich.

Richard:   That’s serious piano music.

Eva:   Yeah. But it’s what I know. It feels like coming home.

Richard:   Now remind me of the Zen Roshi you’re studying with…

Eva:   I’m a member of the Everyday Zen Sangha, which is led by Norman Fischer. He was co-abbot at the San Francisco Zen Center before he started Everyday Zen. We don’t have a building. We just sort of migrate. We do one-day sits at Green Gulch and weekly seminars in Tiburon. And on Zoom, we’ve become really an international sangha. People join in from Germany, Australia, et cetera. Norman’s an amazing teacher and you can find his dharma talks at everydayzen.org  So, that’s a plug for Norman. He’s also a prolific and respected poet.

Richard:   How wonderful. Are there any particular contemporary artists, let’s say, that you find compelling? Any who come to mind?

Eva:   Well, one is sitting right there [points], Patsy Krebs, my longtime friend who does beautiful, minimal, abstract work. - Do you want names?

Richard:   Yes, I was looking for names. How about Agnes Martin?

Eva:   Yes, of course. Sometimes, though, I think about the fact that the artists I look at a lot are often figurative. Like, I love Alice Neel. I just find her a fabulous painter.

Richard:   She is amazing. Maybe we can open this up to some questions.

Audience:   I have a question. First of all, did you grow up Catholic?

Eva:   No, I did not. That was by a fluke.

Audience:   I’m very interested in which materials you use, and how did you come to those materials? I mean if you don’t mind talking a little bit about your process.

Eva:   I’m assuming you’re talking about Yupo paper.

Same questioner:   I am, and the paint.

Eva:   Well, the Yupo paper is probably the only thing that might be unusual. I just stumbled on it and liked the way it did not absorb paint. The way paint sort of sat on the surface. I don’t remember how I started doing collages, but at a certain point I started cutting up pieces of Yupo paper and making collages, and realized it was giving me so much more freedom than if I was simply trying to paint—-where any decision you make is harder to get out of. It’s a more permanent process. Whereas, with collage, it’s —“I don’t like that piece of paper” and I throw it out and try another one. So it was a freeing kind of process.

Lindsay:   I've been various places with you - including Colorado, and you went to Italy as you traveled - and I was wondering, can you talk a little bit about the role of landscape? I know you don’t portray landscape literally, but you talked about blue skies in northern New Mexico. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Eva:   Yes. That was a good thing. I’ve always worked with natural imagery, and I was actually doing landscape paintings in the late ‘80s. So I’ve always had a relationship to the landscape and to nature—and space. That’s my place of comfort when I need to find myself and get some solace. Here, I head out to Point Reyes. Colorado was also an amazing way to be in nature more.

Lindsay:   Do you feel like your work’s changed since you’re not going to Colorado as regularly?

Eva:   Probably it will. I mean, we only sold our place in Colorado in 2023. All of this work was done ’23 and ’24, but it was in response to the Assisi residency. So I don’t know. Probably.

Francesca:   You might want to say also that—I know this about you—that you started out as a sculptor, in sculpture, and many of your shapes are very iconic.

Eva:   Yes. My sculpture was not volumetric. It was very wall-oriented, very flat, but now I feel like the paintings, in a way, are almost like painted depictions of sculpture, you know, renditions of what I started out doing. Yeah, Liz?

Liz:   Can you talk a little bit about how going and visiting the frescoes every day, and being influenced by the space, and the light there, what some of the actual—how that might have gotten into your artwork? What might we see, you know, just talking about like if we’re just doing a little tour around there, what things might be going on.

Eva:   Yeah, that’s a good question. The gold, obviously the use of gold, because of the gold leaf in the frescoes; also the hard edges on the shapes. There’s really no blending in my work or very little. So when you look at the pre-Renaissance work, it’s shape against shape. There’s not the light source that became an important part of Western art, so when you look at my work, it’s really shape against shape.

Some of the colors are directly from the frescoes. I was very struck by the muted grays and greens and violets. There would be these very muted down colors against the gold; it was a striking contrast. And then some sense of drapery. I mean you’re looking at these saints and angels, and you can’t get away from the drapery so that became part of it. Yeah.

Archana:   My memory, I’m going to go back and check my memory of course, and see your show again and leave, but my memory is that a lot of the forms you use feel to me like shields or sails. You know, there’s a kind of stretched feeling to them, or the turning of the form slightly. Not super-flat, but still…so I was wondering if there’s any resonance in the sail or the shield, or anything like that that you were sensing or carry forward

Eva:   Yeah. Well my last series, which Francesca showed, was a lot of shield shapes, and those kind of began, or came together, during the pandemic, when we were all trying to protect ourselves from each other. Then a lot of what you see in medieval work is emblems and shields. I’ve always been interested in those objects. Yeah, sails? Not directly, but for those of you who might have seen the Sienese show in New York, there were a lot of small images of sails, sailboats. So gee, this is something I’ve got to think about. Maybe there will be more sails. Ralph?

Ralph:   When you travel and post things, I often am struck by what a good photographer you are. I just am, you know, amazed. I mean that’s my medium and you just do beautiful work. Does that influence your painting at all or is it something totally separate in your aesthetic life?

Eva:   Thank you. You are a long-time photographer and it’s a very nice compliment. I think I take pictures of things that interest me. I think I’m bringing the same eye to painting and looking at artwork as I am to whatever I see that I end up photographing. So, I don’t think there’s a transference. I think it's the same eye expressed in a different medium. Does that make sense?

Ralph:   Yeah. Do you ever take an image and move from there more directly to a painting?

Eva:   I’m not aware of having done that, but it’s always possible. Somebody back there or somewhere?

Question:  I have two super-different questions, but I’m selfish and want to hear about both. One, I was thinking about your brushstrokes in this work, particularly you have lines where your own gesture becomes a form itself, or you’re playing with the form itself in relationship to your gesture. I wondered if you thought about that consciously. And then my second question is that you have students in the room, and that was a big part of your career. I wondered if you had a pedagogy or how that figured into your practice as an artist.

Eva:   That’s a good question, too. I guess the first one about the gesture and what around it. What did you say?

Question:   Well in some of the works, your gesture becomes a form.

Eva:   We might have to stand in front of a painting, but off the top of my head, I think I try to make as many different kinds of surfaces within the image as I can. Like matte against shiny, reflective against flat, gestural against flat, to make this subtle interplay of surface. And the pedagogy, yeah, I mean I taught for about 38 years and I realized that I developed an ability to see things because I had to critique my students’ work quickly. We’d all put it up on the wall and I’d have to come in with some sort of insight, so it developed my ability to see things, to talk about things. And I certainly know color theory backwards and forwards! So you know, yeah. God, what a wonderful room. I have so many people here that I taught and we’re friends, and it’s such a rewarding thing to look back on.

Richard:   Where did you teach?

Eva:   All over. Most of the people in this room are from UC Berkeley Extension. But I taught at the Art Institute and CCA and UC Berkeley proper, and San Francisco State, where I met Patsy. Did you have a question, Patsy?

Patsy:   Lots of times when I look at your work, the forms seem to be in motion or poised as if between motions, and I know you were dancer and studied ballet. I’ve often thought that there’s some physical embodiment in your paintings that comes out as a sort of knowledge of those movements. Do you think so?      

Eva:   I think the movement is important. Like, if it’s a rectangle, I want to make it move. I want to make it on a slight diagonal, or something. I think movement is important, and I’m very attuned to movement, but that’s all I can say. Anything else?

Meredith:  You were talking about the fact that before the Renaissance, the artists were unknown, but before the Renaissance, and correct me, but I believe a lot of the work done then was more flat. Then after the Renaissance, people became more three dimensional. And then a lot of Asian art is also very flat. So it sounds to me like the flatness and the forms that come out of that are what truly influence you, versus necessarily being so involved in the three dimensionalities.

Eva:   You’re very right. Yes, I’m interested in work that is about shape and flatness, and all the work that you’ve talked about is. Then the Renaissance in Western art was the beginning of light source, and modeling, and volume. And those are things that just haven’t grabbed my attention. [to a woman in the audience] Hi, Fran.

Fran:   I guess everybody’s talking about the flatness, but what’s always struck me about your work, which made it so contemplative for me, is the spatial surprises. Are you aware of that? That’s the first thing that always affects me —and just the complexity, or the flatness ends up being spatial somehow.

Eva:   I guess I’m intuitive about it, and that’s what the collage enables me to do, because these are unrelated pieces that I’m trying to make a whole of, and they do have different space in every piece, so yes. Thank you for that.                 

Richard:   I think we’re just about there, but maybe one last question: where are you right now with your work?

Eva:   I would say I’m waiting.

Richard:   Waiting. Yes, an important place to be. Thank you.

Francesca:   Thank you both very much for coming, and that was a great discussion.