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Tales of the Bittersweet by EveNSteve
Continuing their long-standing investigation into memory, myth, and landscape– EveNSteve’s newest body of work, Tales of the Bittersweet, represents a decisive new chapter characterized by intense color, experimental optics, secret messages, and an overt engagement with the uncanny.
Intense Color, Experimental Optics
The most striking aspect of these works may be the embrace of chromatic extremity—a kind of unapologetic, ecstatic beauty—which revels in primary colors. Images are made using the vintage Leica M9, a digital camera notable for its atypical sensor and the unusual “bloom” it can coax from colors, rendering hues in a way that feels slightly outside of time, imbued with an intensity that can border on the hallucinatory.
In this sense, these new works exist in the space between photograph and painting, choreography and apparition. Reds feel mythic and arterial, blues surge like tidewater or dusk, yellows and golds radiate heat and longing. It is beauty pushed past the comfortable; beneath the allure lies something more unsettled—a familiar EveNSteve tension between enchantment and unease.
Combining the extreme precision of the M9 camera with primitive, often flawed lenses, the effect becomes an embrace of the imperfect and the preternatural. Long exposures invite motion into the frame: figures shimmer, houses tilt, grass fields melt. Figures vibrate at their edges, as if only half anchored to this world. Light seems to inhabit the subjects from within. The world is breathing.
Secret Messages
Across centuries, writers and artists have been drawn to the quiet magic of inscriptions made directly onto glass—messages that exist not as obvious declarations but as secrets waiting for the right angle of light. Robert Burns famously etched verses into tavern windows with a diamond-tipped stylus; Louisa May Alcott’s sister May, and both Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne left delicate inscriptions on the panes of their Concord homes. In each case, the writing is not immediately visible. You look through the window first, out to the landscape or the street beyond. Only when the sun shifts, or when your eye refocuses, does the handwriting flash into visibility for a heartbeat. It’s as if the past leans forward and breathes a line of verse into your ear.
This tradition is at the heart of the inscribed surfaces in EveNSteve’s newest works. It is a continuation of their ongoing exploration of “the hidden text,” but this time the mechanism is subtler, more ghostlike.
Eve’s etched phrases—scratched into varnish, half-hidden in gloss—occupy the same liminal space as those historic diamond inscriptions: neither fully present nor absent, neither certainty nor mirage. One can live with these works for years without ever catching all the words. And yet, in the right light, the text rises—whispering, warning, blessing, remembering. It is a dialogue activated by time and sunlight, a kind of spectral authorship. The artwork becomes a living narrative object, carrying its own inner weather. It is not a passive artifact but a participant, a storyteller, a holder of myth. The artwork becomes a window that looks out, but also a window that looks back.
The Uncanny
It is not surprising then, that the spirit of fairy tales, especially the Grimm stories, also provide inspiration for this body of work. In the Grimm tradition, the forest is always more than a forest: it is the subconscious, the place of transformation, and these works operate in that same symbolic register. The women—blurred, glowing, dissolving into landscape—embody yearning, fear, courage, and curiosity. They are wandering through places that feel distinctly otherworldly, as though the New England landscape had merged with the psychological terrain of myth. The cottages, the fields, the sea horizons, they all appear as if on the verge of revealing something, or as if something has just been revealed and is now slipping back beneath the surface.
Many of the images depict scenes from the New England coast, a place of thresholds: between sea and sky, land and myth, history and reinvention. It is a place where the light feels enchanted—Hopper’s light, Eugene O’Neill’s light, the restless Atlantic light. The decision to embrace that light fully marks a shift toward a mythopoetic vision—less documentary, more dream.
A Hybrid Craft
Technically, the works continue EveNSteve’s long-standing interest in physicality and craft. The deconstructed paper bag, hand-coated and irregular at its edges, remains central. The brushwork around the borders reminds the viewer that these images are made objects—labored over, touched by hand, imperfect by design, one-of-one artworks. They are artifacts that happen to share a root with photography. The hybridity is essential. It is the mixed media ethos—an embrace of both film-era craft and digital-era possibility, but always with a fidelity to texture, surface, and the hand.
Taken as a whole, this new EveNSteve series feels like a maturation, a deepening, a more daring push into the intersection of beauty and strangeness. It is their most fairy-tale-infused work to date, their most chromatically bold, and their most convinced of the idea that art can hold hidden messages—messages that reveal themselves only to those who linger. Tales of the Bittersweet represents a major new chapter for EveNSteve: work that is luminous, haunted, whispered, and alive.
