Eva Droppova's paintings are inspired by questions
addressed to the Spirit World and take shape in
language understood only by the artist.
—Curator's notes
Well, isn't that always the way?
Especially with difficult work
what sits on the wall or the page
or what offends a preconceived ear
can be an ice slope with no Sherpas,
where it's up to you to ax out footholds,
supposing all the way this, no maybe that
tack will lead to at least a base camp
(what's illusory anyway) of "understanding,"
where we kid ourselves, though it is a rush,
that we've divined artistic lingua.
It likely began in Mrs. Nash's Second Grade
with the glances over to Jennifer's drawing
because your manilla resisted any first,
irretrievable mark, even a child's horizon,
the line that can never be wrong.
Yet Jennifer across the table was in the zone,
in a dialogue with those 16 Crayola Gods,
humming at the same time even,
her nail-bitten fingers autonomic.
God forbid though she ends up like Eva Droppova,
round-the-bend from a son's suffering,
locked up tight in her Bratislava house
but with access to felt-tip pens, paper,
and where, apparently, someone visited,
someone who contacted a gallery friend,
and now the world approaches her work.
Or is this but rank appropriation?
It's like the stories from great-aunts
of the old party-lines, where phone calls
sometimes crossed, when it must have taken
an overwhelming push of propriety
to not listen, to instead softly hang up
as strange voices played out strange lives.
But a painting or a play or a carved
piece of soap is different, isn't it?
Different at least from eavesdropping
on Eva Droppova's transforming pain.
That is, the play or soap aspires to be
an intercepted message, the Spirit World
petitioned in public on purpose for money.
Oftentimes though, there's an iron-poor Operator
at Spirit World central switchboard,
her headset at a rakish angle she pops gum,
daydreaming of what, menfriends? Casseroles?
All the while pushing home connections
to (hopefully) the few world souls
equipped to listen, to pull some sense from
what's deep code-talk for the rest of us,
the lay who stalk the galleries,
take measured steps back from work
and there, helpless to do otherwise,
blurt off-the-wall comments.
