This video clip, made during Eve’s 88th year, comes from the statement written by Eve and originally read at her 80th birthday party.
In Process - Nov 9, 1990
(written and read by Eve Tartar at her 80th birthday party)
Eighty is POWER!
Eighty is license to DO what you want, and to BE what you are.  Being eighty makes me realize I should have been so all these long years, getting here, because of the freedom that comes from this achievement, if you do it right.
Being eighty is a state other people have invented.  It’s an idea and a mirage. Being eighty is a very special state of being. Of course the body is like a thermometer that gives you information, but the mind is timeless, ageless, boundless.
Being eighty is like having reached Mt. Everest and knowing you have to come down, and the plateau you come down to is not the same plateau you left. Everything is different from the vantage point of the mountain peak of eighty.
I have no idea of what it is like to be eighty. Don’t be afraid of forty or fifty. It’s always risky to step into the unknown - and only the unknown is worth risking for. Repetition and the familiar are comfortable but have little vitality and no creativity. Every morning is waking up to a new life, for the first time, and seeing light, hearing the cosmic sound, breathing in the heady perfume of the earth, and breakfast is a feast. I could be eighteen and not eighty to experience a day this way, but at eighteen I was too filled with the business of living to stop long enough to savor these free, ubiquitous gifts. Now I have time for everything.
Eighty is power. At eighty you don’t have to be like anyone else, or obey any but the natural laws. That's power. That's why these are the golden years. What greater power is there than freedom and the awareness of freedom?
You also have the power to say NO - do nothing - choose the unconventional and step out of the mainstream, and what is more powerful than creating your own rhythms? And if you are self-regulating and not a dependent, you can safely be an eccentric.
I have to consciously remind myself I am eighty because I am not familiar with the world’s eighty. Sometimes I think I am ninety - sometimes sixty - and it seems the same. Where it’s really at is in my heart, mind, and imagination. Emotions are ageless. The body holds me in check but the rest of me soars, and without brakes.
Let me take the fear of old age away from you. Growing old is not all fading away and diminishing. Rather, compensations gather around you and comfort you, and there are many privileges. You grow in courage to think, be, say, do what you wish, and that adds up to being queen, king, emperor, or better still, wise and serene.
To use our power to get what we want is like making war (whatever euphemism we use) but to use our energy to “be” what we want, or even to be aware of the process of becoming what we want: now in THAT, really, we are creating peace, beauty, and love.
We love our friends, but we free them from duty and time. No Guilt! No Guilt! We friends are the favored ones on this earth. All the gifts of the planet are ours. Only degree separates us. The geniuses of our world have given us their treasures: art, music, thoughts, beauty, science, wheels. They are ours. Our senses are bombarded with the riches around us. We deserve everything we appreciate. No guilt! No guilt!
If, added to all this cornucopia of spilling blessings, we can also contribute something of our own, that is indeed the overflowing cup. No guilt! No guilt!
To feel the surge of creative power that my life expresses is the greatest aphrodisiac, and at eighty I can use all the stimuli I can get. Encourage me, please, to continue this expression, for we magnetize wisdom out of each other, and wisdom is the climax of experience.
I have a comforting message for all of us present. We are like that toy that always lands upright no matter how much it’s pushed around. And we are all gathered here together to affirm our durability, because every one of us has come through ordeal into affirmation, healing, laughter, beauty, and love. That’s quite upright, isn’t it?
Thank you for being here for me.   What a privilege!

Eve: on Creativity...

Creativity is the marriage of innocence and skill. It is the courage of exploring the unknown, of allowing the rising to the top of existence what is submerged below consciousness. It is trusting the unfamiliar into life. It is allowing the mind to trail behind the doing. The creating comes first, and the judgment follows.

On The Fundamentals Of Her Art

My work has always revolved around two fundamentals, namely around the principles of balancing the masculine and the feminine, as suggested by Dr. Carl Jung’s writings on wholeness and completion, and around the basic laws upon which the 3,000 year old “I Ching”, the Chinese Book of changes, is built. This latter is a remarkable blending of wisdom-poetry-symbol-prophecy, that deals with symbols even as I deal with symbols, and begins with what is called the Masculine-Creative Trigram and the Feminine Receptive Trigram. Out of these primal trigrams were developed symbolic language of 645 hexagrams that were said to cover the total human experience.
An infinity of creative forces open up when these images suggested by Jung and the “I Ching” push into the inner screen of my awareness and form themselves into a painting, construction, or collage, preceding the actual beginning of a new work. From then on, it is a process akin to translating from one language to another without sacrificing inner meaning and beauty to outward structure.
In all my work, the viewer will find that the composition follows the Greek Laws of Aesthetics, which da Vinci called the Golden Section. “Divine Proportion” existed in every work of art from the swelling columns of the Parthenon, to the Ming Vase, to an African Fetish, to Renaissance paintings and sculpture, and on to the works of Picasso.
In modern art the Golden Section is obscured but still exists. “Divine Proportion” is an equation that is the law of life, the way the universe is put together, and it deals with the law of diminishing thirds. Put simply, look at the proportions of hand, wrist up to elbow, then elbow up to shoulder. The same diminishing thirds can be seen in head, torso, legs, etc. Aesthetics are built around the natural feeling of balance and harmony because we are perfect models of these proportions.