Artwork of the Week!

Artwork of the Week!
Week 14:

Eva Stubbs (born 1925)
Self-portrait with Skulls
1999
Charcoal and conté on paper

Eva Stubbs was born in Hungary. She completed a Diploma of Fine Arts from the University of Manitoba in 1957, but did not begin a regular art practice until 1974. Best known as a sculptor working both figuratively and abstractly in clay and bronze, Stubbs turns to drawing on occasion in order to create something less labour intensive and more immediate. In the somber Self-portrait with Skulls, Stubbs recalls the turbulent personal history of her formative years. She depicts a vision of her youthful self enclosed in a window-like shape, physically separated from the drawn face that she identifies as her mother, in the upper right, and the skeletons that are her ancestors, at the upper left. At the age of four, her parents left Hungary for South America, taking her older brother with them, but leaving the artist in the care of her father’s brother and his wife. Although her parents returned to Europe several years later and she lived with them for a year in Spain, Stubbs was sent back to stay with her uncle and aunt after civil war broke out. Only at the age of fourteen was she reunited with her family, this time in Tangier, where they stayed until they could secure safe passage to Canada in 1944.