Art & Love: My Life Illuminated in Egg Tempera

By Lora Arbrador

The project started as a coffee table art book but evolved into a full-blown memoir, as many of the paintings depict scenes from my life.

Two main themes thread through the narrative. The first is my struggle to learn the egg tempera painting technique, which is beautiful, but baffling. The other is my journey to understand my sensual nature and difficulty in forming a stable, romantic relationship.

The book spans decades in which I was a flower child in the Berkeley counterculture of the 1960s, became a registered nurse to support my art practice in the 1970s, moved to the woods of Maine where I built my own teepee. In the 1980s I was a research nurse during the AIDS epidemic and many of my paintings portray, those horrific times. I also joined a commune which turned out to be a cult, became pregnant, abandoned and homeless. Every page is illustrated, either by a drawing or painting of mine, a photograph, or other image. There is a bonus chapter, "A Taste of Egg Tempera History."