[media-credit name=’JAKE NAUGHTON/Herald photo’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]Painter Eva Struble has won many prestigious awards during her short career and has had her works displayed all over the country.

But Tuesday, when visiting the University of Wisconsin campus to present her work, she modestly introduced herself by saying "I'm Eva, I'm a painter, and I live in Brooklyn."

Struble spoke in front of a large group as part of the UW Art Department's "Visiting Artists Colloquium" series to speak about her career and work, which she said is "toxic and landscape looking."

After beginning her work as an artist in a high school photography class, Struble attended Brown University as an art major, where she was "constantly distracted by other interests."

Struble said she began to concentrate on painting as her main art form midway through her undergraduate career, after a trip studying abroad in Senegal and at Parsons School of Design in Paris. Even then, Struble said, she did not adopt a consistent style.

"As an undergrad, my work was constantly shifting between abstract and observational," Struble said.

Struble developed a specific style and tone in her painting during graduate school, something she had been struggling to cultivate since the beginning of her college career.

"One of my teachers tried to help me find ways to talk about my work, instead of turning my works into something that was easy to discuss," Struble said.

During her time at Yale University, where she received a Masters of Fine Arts degree, Struble said she noticed her paintings "becoming more and more representational, without me meaning for them to."

Struble then began to focus on controversial subjects like pollution and global warming, she said, allowing an interest in environmental ruin to take over her work.

Today, these themes continue to dominate Struble's art.

Her recent solo exhibit at the Lombard Fried Art Gallery in New York titled "Superfund" depicted a series of reconstructed toxic waste sites, which had been capped off and turned into things like miniature golf courses and circus grounds.

Another recent exhibit showcased the effects of the Greenpoint oil spill in Newton Creek — a polluted waterway near Struble's home in Brooklyn, N.Y.

While some audience members praised Struble's ability to touch a political nerve through her art, others questioned the paradoxical nature of her style and practice of turning devastated scenes into lush paintings. For UW sophomore Jonathan Steinitz, who came to watch Struble's presentation, the analysis of her works was unnecessary."She's a very accomplished artist," Steinitz said. "Let her work stand for itself."