I have a friend in Uruguay who paints like an angel and gives like a dear friend.  She is Eva Claessens, the artist.  Eva arrived in our little corner of Uruguay a handful of years back, and she and her friend, Kris, set about restoring a wonderful staging post as their house.  It is a perfect reflection of her, this house, a graceful mixture of old world charm and strong bones, a building that commands its remote, rural landscape with a faded but steely resolve.

Eva’s work, not unlike her house, is primarily form that imparts mood.  The contours of her bodies, faces and flowers are bold and full of movement, and yet the empty, half-finished features and smudged lines tell a deeper story that is, one feels, but a whisper away from the rich interior life of the artist herself.  There is an iron butterfly quality to her work, soft yet strong, bold yet withholding.  I own a number of Eva’s works both large and small. I have a large painting of a woman’s face whose eye follows me wherever I am in my small house.  I have a lovely print of an iris, one of her many flower pictures that I cherish. And then she has made for me a handful of painted ceramic tiles which decorate the facade of  our small casita like talismans.

<a href="http://evaclaessens blog link.com/”>http://evaclaessens.com/http://evaclaessens.com/