TEDxLisboa Photo Essay

On March 15, 2025, I had the pleasure of meeting people from around the world at Culturgest in Lisbon, Portugal. The 18-speaker TEDxLisboa series was punctuated by breaks when people would come out an engage with my Nightly Noodle Monthly station, take a zine, have a chat, and add to the big writing prompts on the wall behind me on the paper that Pedro from TEDx purchased and set up for my interactive artist project centered on a zine inspired by the themes and speakers of the day. My childhood friend Allison came with and got these great shots! A special thank you to Marta Gonzaga for including me in the day’s programming, and to all the speakers for being so passionate about creating a more equitable, sustainable world to live in.

Read the zine for free at the end of this photo essay.

Nightly Noodle Monthly and TEDxLisboa issue for March 2025.

From Odetta to Overwhelm: An Artist's Struggles with Attention and Intuition

At 2 a.m. early Saturday, I woke up watching podcasts, konmari-ing my sock drawer, filming this winter’s first snowfall that so cutely happened right on the solstice and then drifted back to sleep at 5:30 a.m. for 4 more hours.

I spent the day taking apart big envelopes to put back together into even bigger envelopes with lots of packing tape after lining the paintings with bubblewrap and cardboard; grew excited with each completed package; took this picture. I love the analog world and resent my fragmented and practically shattered attention span. I could have been quietly picking a banjo and eking out a new song helping me process the complications of life, but instead i’m watching podcasts.

Which brings me to a fun musing:

Yesterday someone said, flippantly but perhaps more accurate than not, ‘I give the internet five years.” Because the internet is a commercial hellscape of popups and garbled AI. God, please be true. I don’t know how the internet is going to evolve, but I hope I evolve back into a fully analog creature, capable of full appreciative immersion with no instinct to grab my phone; free of anxiety; released from this technological loop and catapulted into a nirvana of potent reality.

I dream of paintings made without interruption for twelve hours straight, like I used to do back in 2005, playing Odetta’s music on repeat. I listened to so much Odetta while painting, even moving to Chicago on a whim in 2006 because I thought I’d find the same feeling there, the feeling of listening to her music. I make loose associations and follow them with conviction. It’s called intuition; called being an artist.

This blog post is a portion of today’s installment of my newsletter The World-Famous Art Studio Dispatch that I sent out this morning. To subscribe to fun, occasional writings my from art studio (always non-salesy, except for that one time I announced a Black Friday sale), sign up here. http://eepurl.com/dHIgT1

Studio Visit and Black Friday Sale

Join me Sunday, December 1 for a studio zoom visit starting at 3:00 p.m. EST. to see what I’m working on and for a raffle for a free mini painted portrait of yourself or someone else. Each purchase of artwork during the sale weekend is two entries into this free raffle and attending the studio visit is one entry. The sale will run Nov 29 at 12:01 a.m. through Sun Dec 1 at 11:59 p.m.

You can register on eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/studio-visit-with-eva-avenue-tickets-1093417935479?aff=oddtdtcreator

Here is the Zoom link for Dec. 1 at 3 p.m. EST. https://zoom.us/j/9879190071?omn=98690579774

I'm A Starving Artist (with snacks)

I worked late each night this week till Thursday night came and I enrolled in Amy Weiskopf’s still life oil-painting class Color is Light is Color at the Art Students League. Using a palette knife, I laid down the shadows first and the lights second, finishing with the red beneath it. I hadn’t eaten all day so I ate the apple.

“If you don’t like struggle, painting is not for you!” Amy said.

Down in the subway after class got out last night, I marveled at the wet painting in my hands. I loved Amy’s approach of being very critical and at the end of class going “great painting!” lol

The next day I worked from home, had a long meeting with Fordham University, and ate strawberries in my strawberry sweater while I waited for a Mexican restaurant to open for lunch because I want their $3 birria tacos and my stomach was rumbling from morning French Press coffee and no food.

Slightly satiated by the strawberries but deranged with hunger nonetheless, I stop at a churro cart on my way to the taco shop. I order two birria tacos and a chorizo tostada and sit down to write my dispatch, interrupted when they bring me the best flan I’ve ever had in my life. Out of respect, and with much reverence, I close my laptop and finish the flan.

Eating is a necessity but cooking is an art.