Click above to hear Holland Dieringer talk about Eve Garrison and her work.

A practicing artist for over 70 years, Eve Garrison created hundreds of paintings exploring a range of themes, aesthetic styles, and media. At the beginning of her career, she studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, developing a fascination with the human figure. Her early portraits were painted in a realist style, but “then all of a sudden there is a break from something very lifelike and real to something pseudo-Cubist and surrealistic,” says Holland Dieringer, the gallery coordinator of the Rubin-Frankel Gallery at Boston University’s Florence and Chafetz Hillel House.

“You can see through the paintings how Garrison’s mind opened throughout the years,” says Dieringer, who attributes Garrison’s shift in artistic style and subject to the culture and climate of World War II.

Eve Garrison: Life Study — 70 Years of Figurative Painting, currently on display at the Rubin-Frankel Gallery, is the first solo exhibition of Garrison’s work in Boston, the city of her birth. Garrison’s great-grandson Ari Dach (CAS’06, SMG’06) was an active member of the Boston University Hillel, and he was one of the key contributors to making the exhibition possible.

“Garrison was a successful female painter who raised a family in a male-dominated world,” says Dieringer, “so it’s not just the paintings that I’m interested in. It’s her life and the perseverance that she needed to have in order to get where she got.”

Eve Garrison: Life Study — 70 Years of Figurative Painting will be shown at Boston University Hillel House Rubin-Frankel Gallery, 213 Bay State Rd., until January 4, 2008. The exhibition will be closed from December 24 through January 1 during Boston University’s intersession. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Robin Berghaus can be reached at berghaus@bu.edu.