Eva Rose Askew (b. 2002) is a multimedia artist from Los Angeles, California, currently based between Connecticut and New York. She graduated from Bard College in May 2025 with a BA in Studio Art. Her creative practice includes photography, poetry, and mixed-media painting. She explores themes of nature, light, corporeality, and surreality. Through both image and text, she describes the unfolding of interior states into exterior form.
Artist Statement
Three years ago I discovered my body has a limit that resides in my neck and travels through my shoulder. As a result of repetitive motion, it makes its way down my right arm in the form of a dull ache, hindering my ability to render fine details for hours with oil paint.
So I started to spill water—
dousing thick pieces of paper on the floor of my studio, then dropping liquid watercolor paint onto the paper’s skin. I would pour, drip, and lift, and cause the current of the water to spread, like a spirit, into space.
This space transcended one dimension and became two as it absorbed the water gathering beneath and all around it. I surrendered to the swift nature of the spilling, its freedom and desire to disrupt stillness. With one quick gesture, a sliver of liquid red expanded outwards and disturbed the creamy white that had settled. The two colors swirled together, then nervously dispersed.
In this way, spontaneous planes of intuition bloomed at my feet, a birth. I worked into these planes with pencil, acrylic, pastel, collage, and wax, until the lesions of light scarred the surface and color configured new entities. I switched between the use of my right hand and my left, listening to the hum of my limit as it grew louder. The developing images were abstract and metaphorical. A space between the external and the internal began to open.
These images are colorful portals from our world of clear delineation to a world of fluidity and enigma. Their environments are composed of natural elements—terrestrial, cosmic or celestial, and elements of my body in interior form: anatomical, embryonic, uterine, physical. The flashes of fluorescence present in these images symbolize pain.
Anam Cara, a book of Celtic Wisdom by John O’Donohue, explores the understanding that landscape is the firstborn of creation, reflecting a kind of silent consciousness overflowing with soul. Human presence brings a recognizable intimacy to the anonymity of landscape. The porous nature of skin allows light from the world to enter and flow through it. The body is therefore a threshold, imbued with elements of the earth, and when this corporeality dissolves, we naturally become one with it.
Russian abstract painter, Wassily Kandinsky, believed that color has the power to make a deep impression on the soul. In this, art is connected to the soul as an unconscious bond or inner need. Similarly, American Modernist painter, Georgia O’Keeffe, viewed abstraction as the clearest means of conveying and clarifying the intangible thing within herself.
On a raw, hand-stretched canvas, I painted the image from an ultrasound of my neck and combined it with this process of spilling to give the anonymous, intangible part of myself an appearance, as it lives with and always moves through me.
Through spilling, my limit grows wings.
It learns to adjust to this vessel of flesh, warmth and thought—the land of belonging that I know as my own.
Artwork
oil paint on canvas
liquid watercolor & oil paint on canvas
watercolor, pencil and pastel on paper
watercolor on paper
watercolor on paper
watercolor, salt, & collage on paper
watercolor and acrylic on paper
(Self-Portrait)
Watercolor & pencil on paper
acrylic, collage, string and cardboard on wood
watercolor paint & pencil on paper
watercolor on paper
oil paint on canvas
oil paint on canvas
watercolor & pencil on paper
acrylic, pastel & collage on canvas
Poetry
Soft White Center
I like the sharp crunch
of a beaten sheath of ice,
it’s soft white center–how it's hardened peel
crushes into glitter,
spreads and then unfurls
like a bulb beginning to open.
I like the warm hues
of a white rose left in lamp light,
how its folds tuck yellow into shadows,
into hidden hinges starting
to unwind and collapse,
to sink–like closed eyes
in release.
I have watched my body churn before a canvas,
weeping white into gold with both hands,
as a blinking star begins to swell.
I like to soak cemented floors with cold water,
feeding liquid into pigment like a mother,
to watch newborn tendrils curl and nervously disperse.
And as the pulse pools and starts to settle,
I like to wash it all away with one quick gesture.
A Body in Time
I wish my hidden veins could sing
and tell me what prevents their breath
from moving like it did when they
were small, free and unencumbered.
I know the burden of what binds
you, the unseen way of limbs–mine,
with new age, how tender is the
skin, how quiet, the crackling of
a wrist, the whining of a neck,
the call for weighted hands, pressure—
for someone else’s touch. They try
to speak to me with a dull ache,
we can’t be everything that you
have lost. Instead it lives with me,
within; this silence, a wingless
bird waiting, a body in time.
Efflorescence
Somehow
something new
emerges through
the moss of thought
between now, where patient hands routinely tick,
and before—where precarious,
sewed patches of time
fade in and out,
like the seamless movement of clouds,
in surrender to a breath of cool air.
Just as the parting lips of a window suck smoke into the sky
or an exhale breaks through the surface of water
warm static starts to spill out of the opening.
You wonder if it’s heat will stain your face
or hold it.
You wonder if it could tear a hole in the horizon
and expel all of the birds inside your body,
as kindred feathers flicker before kindling,
to cast what has passed
into gold.
The Last Bird of Glass
The Grey Bird
and the Lost Bird
The Last Bird of Glass
drops a feather, like a shedding
regretting the undoing
of the Lost Bird,
Who waits for the Grey Bird to replace him,
to dig with dull beaks into backs made of glass
and to groom till the sky opens up.
But the calling of the open
of the doorway
of the hand
fills the beating of the body of the Lost Bird.
In pursuit of the Lost Bird, the Grey Bird goes missing, and
the Last Bird of Glass begins singing.
The Grey Bird and the Lost Bird grow out their wings
to empty through a mouth of endless blue,
while the longing and the singing of the Last Bird of Glass
abidingly breaks in two.
The silence that follows,
the wading through wings,
holds impatient hands in place,
and the missing
and closing,
the beating of hearts,
leaves a feather at the bottom
of a start.
Supernova
Two starlings pause
under an archway of leaking luminescence,
cloaked in the punctured skin of a decomposing sky
like a depleted memory
collapsing
into puffs of dust and gas
or a lover’s shadow
threatening
to slide right off your back
and trail behind stretching starlight
Without end.