arts&life

Breath Of
Fresh Air W

See the work of

Maya Eventov — and

meet the artist — at

the Danielle Peleg

Gallery.

SUZANNE CHESSLER
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

hen Maya Eventov
and her family
moved from Russia
to Canada in 1990, she imme-
diately was drawn to her new
country’s birch trees — remind-
ers of the natural beauty in the
country of her birth.
In a sort of kinship with the
enduring sentimentality of
couples carving their initials
into the bark of trees, Eventov
turned from brushes to knives
and used her artistic talents to
sculpturally paint images of the
trees she so admired — build-
ing instead of whittling.
The technique, comfortable
for her with the use of acrylics,
spread across all of her subjects

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November 30 • 2017

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on canvas, whether people,
places or abstractions.
“Working with knives
requires very decisive strokes,
and, at some point, I was con-
fident enough to start doing
that,” Eventov says. “The tech-
nique allows me to be much
more expressive than I would
be with brushes. The color can
have more dimensions because
of the layering.”
Eventov, whose work is
shown in galleries around the
world, has long been repre-
sented at the Danielle Peleg
Gallery in West Bloomfield,
but she will have more concen-
trated attention with her first
exhibit there running Dec. 1-18.
The artist will be present for
the opening reception on the
evening of Dec. 1, when there
will be music and catered hors
d’oeuvres celebrating the vari-
ety of her expressiveness.
“I’m very excited about this
exhibit and glad to be visiting
Michigan, where my youngest
daughter is a medical student
at Wayne State University,”
says Eventov, 53, whose oldest
daughter is an economist. “My
husband, Boris, an engineer,
and I travel often to see our
daughter in Detroit.”