Every human is exceptional. For some, this becomes obvious to their biographies.
Eva started with painting as a profession at the age of 54. In this respect, she can be regarded as a “late vocation”, but if you take a closer look at her art, you realize that this is not true. For her art to absorb life energy and turn it into an artistic form, she has, first and foremost, face life and let it get to her and not to avoid it. And this is perhaps the most distinctive trait in Eva's life: That in everything she does, she refuses to take quick shortcuts.
At first glance, Eva's curriculum vitae may seem quite conventional: Starting with elementary school, high school, German Abitur, occupational therapist ... later then: marriage, two daughters, homestead owner, ... even later: university lecturer, entrepreneur´s wife, charity, ... much later: grandchildren ... so far so bourgeois ...
But that she was far from conventional could be seen early on by looking at her tour list: As a 17-year-old she travelled with tent and backpack through Ireland, hiked a year later for 28 days in permanent Scottish rain and at 19 undertook four difficult tours in Scandinavia, including a solo, cross-country hike from Sulitjelma in Norway to Kvikkjokk in Swedish Lapland and crossed the
Finnmarksvidda with her future husband, which led from Alta on the Norwegian Arctic Sea to the Russian border in north-eastern Finland.
To this day, she still gains new experiences and impressions by travelling into the wild, and these often become quite important for her art work. To mention some examples from recent years: She has spent many summers and one late winter on an uninhabited island in Lake Superior, Canada, while on other occasions she rode on horseback with Mongolian hunters through the Siberian Altai (where the journey began at +20 °C and ended at -20 ° C), witnessed Namibia's worst drought in over 60 years and celebrated her 50th birthday by hiking 800 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail through Oregon and Washington.
Eva can be considered a thoroughly empirical person. Everything is experience, nothing is logic. Everything is about fact, nothing is about notion. Everything is pattern, nothing is concept. Everything is perception, nothing is judgment. It's about reality, not about truth. One can understand why such a person, Eva at a young age, choose occupational therapy as a profession, because it is a very practical profession in which the empirical findings are dominant and theoretical concepts become meaningful only to a much lesser degree. So how about statistics and test theory?
That is typical for Eva: at the age of 38, when her two daughters were out of the woods, she started to study psychology. After her diploma she gained a doctorate in the driest and most abstract part of psychology, namely methodology and became finally a university teacher in statistics and test theory at the renowned Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Just why did she do that? Because she was particularly talented at it? Because it was easy or profitable for her? No. She did it, because she felt she had deficits in the abstract realm. That's how she ticks!
After 8 years of teaching, she gave up her job and the associated permanent position and enrolled in a private art school.
In 2020 she moved from Upper Bavaria, which had been her home for 23 years, to the other end of Germany, where she now lives and works with her husband on a former farm. If there were to be one constant in Eva's life, it would have to be called “development”. And yes: standards. She is convinced that one must not only face the challenges of life and accept the hardships and suffering hidden within them, but also, in a certain sense, seek them.
This includes also an openness to radical changes, but always and above all listening to one´s inner voice (she calls it “listening to the body”). This inner voice led her into ever new living conditions, far away countries, different professions as well as changing places of residence. The fact that her body rarely lets her down is in this respect rather helpful. Though petite in stature, she is what Americans call a "tough cookie." (When she was young, Eva was able to carry 40% of her own body weight over long distances and even in her sixth decade the monstrous size of her backpack arouses the admiration of even the most ambitious wilderness hiker.)
Her enthusiasm for extreme characters is mutually reciprocative. She finds her way just as easily among an all-male hunting party in the mountains of north-eastern Kazakhstan, as she does among traditional Taekwon-Do fighters (a sport she actively practiced for two decades), or on a female-dominated horse ranch.
But the really important changes and developments are of an inner nature. They cannot be described. Fortunately, everything that could be said about Eva's life, lives in her pictures, which tell more about her than any biography.
Friedrich Böbel, November 2022
