About

Eve Bigaj paints brilliantly colorful, emotionally intense portraits of cacti, in oil paints and pastels. Instead of an art degree, she holds a PhD in philosophy from Harvard University (her dissertation discussed the internal experience of beauty). She has painted her whole life, but she started taking her art seriously in 2015, when she first attended David Andrus’s Painting the Figure in Color class in Cambridge, MA. In 2018-19, she spent a formative year in Senegal, where her art was inspired by the country’s Sub-Saharan light and its beautiful, colorfully-clad residents. After earning her PhD in 2020, she decided academia wasn’t for her and got a coding job to support her art habit. She spent 2023-2024 working remotely, traveling across the Southwest and painting the people and landscapes she met along the way — before her love of saguaros compelled her to settle in Tucson at the start of 2025. Outside Arizona, she has exhibited in solo and group shows in Boston and Senegal. Her piece Today, Only Beauty was awarded first prize in the advanced pastel category at the Tombstone Art Gallery’s 2025 annual art show.