Eve Drewelowe

The Yodel of the Yucca

1946

From her earliest memory, Eve Drewelowe wanted to be an artist, and she became the first student to receive a masters of fine arts from the University of Iowa. After graduation, she went with her new husband to Boulder, Colorado, where she soon found herself in the role of dean’s wife. Eventually that responsibility and its “chores” proved to be too restrictive. After a health crisis, Drewelowe had a self-described “reincarnation” in which she resolved to make a place for her creativity. Naturally effusive, she yet valued being alone, and her strong feelings for life were expressed in her exuberant paintings. Growing up on an Iowa farm, Drewelowe developed a love for the land from her “environmentalist” father, who died when she was eleven. Subsequently, The Dean of the Graduate School at Iowa served as a father-figure when he facilitated her entry into the graduate program in art. Seemingly skeptical, Carl Seashore secretly wanted the young woman to “establish a first in the history of art training across the nation,” as the artist would later reminisce. Drewelowe graduated in 1924, and she later was a benefactor of what became one of the nation’s leading college art programs. At college, Drewelowe met and married a political science student, Jacob van Ek. Accepting a teaching position at the University of Colorado, van Ek moved to Boulder with his bride, who pursued her interest by helping found the Boulder Artists’ Guild. In 1928-1929, they traveled around the world to twenty-three countries for thirteen months, during which Drewelowe filled seven sketchbooks. With her husband now a dean, she threw herself into remodeling their house, a domestically acceptable creative project. Balancing her art and her duties as a dean’s wife, Drewelowe felt increasing frustration, and her health began to suffer. In the catalogue of a 1988 retrospective, she gave voice to her desire for self-determination: “Housewife! What an odious word! First! Foremost! Always! My waking thought from an embryo was on my need to be an artist!” Traveling to New York for her second solo exhibition in 1940, she stopped at the Mayo Clinic, where she was diagnosed as having a gastric polyp. This experience led to a new dedication to her painting, a complete turnaround in which she called her “reincarnation.” Inspired by the Rocky Mountains, she painted animated landscapes that pulsated with energy -- as if still in motion from generative forces. With a rainbow palette, Drewelowe created visionary scenes by intensifying colors in lively, rippling patterns. ©David Cook Galleries, LLC