Page 6 - Eva Bosch: Shoes and Stars

In Memories–Figueró’s Studio

In this watercolour with felt pen on paper, Bosch has painted, as though
pinned to the blackboard of her childhood, the following images (clock -
wise from top le/): a ,ayed sheep’s head, a curtained window through
which one glimpses a clouded pale blue sky, a house in pro+le with
a vertical mouth, a steep ,ight of stairs below which is a translucent red
rectangle that might well taste like a lollipop, a +gure shape with large
black bu*ons and divided into top and bo*om halves (an echo of the
top and bo*om divisions of the house), and a shard of fossil. )e lower
third of the canvas is landscaped with two bands, rocky cli0 face and
shoreline. )e red rectangle sits on a small mat of wavelets. Each of these
elements is articulated with a vision that is at once naive and sophisti -
cated, that knows itself and what it is in the same way a child’s drawing
does, but also as though Bosch has revisited her child self with her
adult’s eye; as though she has emptied out the fragments she has found
in the pockets of her history and arranged them for herself as souvenirs.
)ere is a small window in the house in which you can see a pro+le,
it is Bosch herself in her Figueró studio. She writes: ‘I o/en paint there,
look ing out of the window. It feels like a gro*o where I hide from the
villagers and, when she was alive, from my mother’. )e wall of the house
is bathed in the late a/ernoon light you get in Figueró, extraordinarily
beautiful, she says, yet tremendously sad as well.

Ansel Krut
London, June !"!#

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