In several of these efforts, we see a recurrent motif of small bright circles spaced irregularly on the canvas, separate, sometimes close, yet always apart, as islands of assertion in a greater, darker blue sea of indifference. More prominent in some of these works is the larger sweep of contrasting curves and rhythms, through the basic "scene," and with it the sense of winds of change hoped for, but not yet experienced, not yet affecting all.

In a later, less turbulent period, as if in discovery of her own new world, she created the text and illustrations in a series of children's books for Macmillan and Scribner's on Life in a New England Village, the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers and Craftsmen, and The Early People of Florida. Working in the unaffected primitive and indigenous style of a child's sensibility, she returns to basics and to the dreams of that child of 6 she was in a faraway Yugoslavia; and in one work of this series, The Jews of New Amsterdam, she foreshadows the preoccupation of her most recent and most fulfilling period.

In another series of paintings, a synthesis of pictorial and abstract representation, she has embarked on describing a biblical Jerusalem as she sees it, as she feels it. Here is a city of light: nothing is proclaimed, stark-everything is as if given, shining and blessed in the light of day. The semi-abstract shapes evoke an atmosphere of calm, of peace, cypresses in the middle distance aspiring to an orange and yellow sky, palms in the foreground bowing gracefully. The air is clear, the clouds floating on their way, affirming, never hovering, in harmony with everything they sail over.

Here and there a door, a window, a wall, and then a single cypress, or black-apart, a part of it all-stand against a glistening sentimentalism at the other end of the spectrum, yet suggest that all is well in spite of their touches of darkness, for this is home, at long last. Throughout, the focus is on the sense that "the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." This is a show of plenitude in yellows, orange, pastel pinks and purples, and an invitation to partake of it and feel its warmth.

Eva Deutsch Costabel has exhibited her works in one-woman and group shows in Greenwich Village and at the the Yugoslav Press and Cultural Center in New York, among other art centers and galleries; and is represented in permanent museum exhibits in Israel.

Whether as painter, illustrator, and also as a designer and teacher, her aim is "to express life's vibrancy, optimism and joy...to celebrate light and color...to prove through my work in Shakespeare's words, that 'sweet are the uses of adversity.'"

-Herb Schapiro Art Critic