From Odetta to Overwhelm: An Artist's Struggles with Attention and Intuition

At 2 a.m. early Saturday, I woke up watching podcasts, konmari-ing my sock drawer, filming this winter’s first snowfall that so cutely happened right on the solstice and then drifted back to sleep at 5:30 a.m. for 4 more hours.

I spent the day taking apart big envelopes to put back together into even bigger envelopes with lots of packing tape after lining the paintings with bubblewrap and cardboard; grew excited with each completed package; took this picture. I love the analog world and resent my fragmented and practically shattered attention span. I could have been quietly picking a banjo and eking out a new song helping me process the complications of life, but instead i’m watching podcasts.

Which brings me to a fun musing:

Yesterday someone said, flippantly but perhaps more accurate than not, ‘I give the internet five years.” Because the internet is a commercial hellscape of popups and garbled AI. God, please be true. I don’t know how the internet is going to evolve, but I hope I evolve back into a fully analog creature, capable of full appreciative immersion with no instinct to grab my phone; free of anxiety; released from this technological loop and catapulted into a nirvana of potent reality.

I dream of paintings made without interruption for twelve hours straight, like I used to do back in 2005, playing Odetta’s music on repeat. I listened to so much Odetta while painting, even moving to Chicago on a whim in 2006 because I thought I’d find the same feeling there, the feeling of listening to her music. I make loose associations and follow them with conviction. It’s called intuition; called being an artist.

This blog post is a portion of today’s installment of my newsletter The World-Famous Art Studio Dispatch that I sent out this morning. To subscribe to fun, occasional writings my from art studio (always non-salesy, except for that one time I announced a Black Friday sale), sign up here. http://eepurl.com/dHIgT1

Studio Visit and Black Friday Sale

Join me Sunday, December 1 for a studio zoom visit starting at 3:00 p.m. EST. to see what I’m working on and for a raffle for a free mini painted portrait of yourself or someone else. Each purchase of artwork during the sale weekend is two entries into this free raffle and attending the studio visit is one entry. The sale will run Nov 29 at 12:01 a.m. through Sun Dec 1 at 11:59 p.m.

You can register on eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/studio-visit-with-eva-avenue-tickets-1093417935479?aff=oddtdtcreator

Here is the Zoom link for Dec. 1 at 3 p.m. EST. https://zoom.us/j/9879190071?omn=98690579774

I'm A Starving Artist (with snacks)

I worked late each night this week till Thursday night came and I enrolled in Amy Weiskopf’s still life oil-painting class Color is Light is Color at the Art Students League. Using a palette knife, I laid down the shadows first and the lights second, finishing with the red beneath it. I hadn’t eaten all day so I ate the apple.

“If you don’t like struggle, painting is not for you!” Amy said.

Down in the subway after class got out last night, I marveled at the wet painting in my hands. I loved Amy’s approach of being very critical and at the end of class going “great painting!” lol

The next day I worked from home, had a long meeting with Fordham University, and ate strawberries in my strawberry sweater while I waited for a Mexican restaurant to open for lunch because I want their $3 birria tacos and my stomach was rumbling from morning French Press coffee and no food.

Slightly satiated by the strawberries but deranged with hunger nonetheless, I stop at a churro cart on my way to the taco shop. I order two birria tacos and a chorizo tostada and sit down to write my dispatch, interrupted when they bring me the best flan I’ve ever had in my life. Out of respect, and with much reverence, I close my laptop and finish the flan.

Eating is a necessity but cooking is an art.

Cheers from the abyss (with snacks)

I started up an email newsletter October 4, 2024 and I’m posting it as a blog here. If you’d like to get these monthly, sign up easy here: http://eepurl.com/dHIgT1

First installment of The World-Famous Art Studio Dispatch

I just spent my birthday at the Venice Biennale, where I cried in the morning because the lady at the cafe was being mean and weird. I paid for my Italian birthday trip with part of the money I made from a private mural commission in New Jersey, where I spent a full summer of weekends finishing this dramatic seascape on an apartment wall that went over seven feet in either direction. It’s interesting I should end up in water-world Venice after painting all that water. But right before that, I was painting plein-air in Paris as part of my job. I sold a painting - still wet - to a local artist, and was offered an art show at a cafe on Avenue Trudaine near Montmartre. I did not have to buy my own plane tickets, gracias a dios. You probably signed up for these emails a long time ago, and though I’ve hardly written to you, I have a newfound resolve to document things and keep your emails simple, sharing mystery and insight into artistic pursuit. The horrors persist, but so do I. Did you know I put off for three years what took me 20 minutes to complete last night? Merginging subscriber lists and reconnecting Mailchimp with Squarespace, a combination of being fed up with myself and sitting by a pretty lamp with food. Sometimes you just need a big snack and a conversation with the abyss. What I’ve been up to lately… On June 15, 2024, I started a pop culture podcast with my friend Marcella, and it is called I Guess We Can’t Have A Podcast, available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. After 17 amazing episodes, we took a month break and we will return next week. One review reads: Entertaining, Insightful, and Great Soothing Voices - I’m hooked! Such a great companion podcast, makes me feel like I’m having fun convos with my friends with the sudden deep turns into existential or political matters without the valley girl and vocal fry that suddenly all podcasts made by young women (that I used to love) turned into. “That perfect mix between coffee table voice and bestie, that perfect mix of topics between your favorite deep philosophy book and a fashion magazine.” Speaking of the abyss, sometimes when you howl into it, the abyss howls back. I hope this dispatch newsletter inspires reader engagement wherein you to tell me what you’ve got going on creatively, or any weird story that befell you while you were trying to do something amazing. Maybe I’ll feature it in an upcoming installment of The World-Famous Art Studio Dispatch. This is what I live for. All the best, Eva View email in browser The Nightly Noodle Monthly Publishing Co. · 11 W 53rd St · New York, NY 10019 · USA update your preferences or unsubscribe