ART & LOVE

An artist combines autobiography, art history, and her love of egg tempera in this nonfiction work.

“I like your pornography,” Arbrador’s mother once commented on her daughter’s artworks that address often taboo topics, from love and sex to surgery, lactation, and menstruation. These glaring lines in the introduction open what started as a book to showcase the author’s art. Crafted over the course of decades, the work blends a commentary on her individual pieces with autobiographical vignettes. Born to parents who valued the arts (her father was an accomplished photographer, and her mother was an artist who specialized in batik), Arbrador emphasizes her own “non-prodigy beginnings” as she struggled to find her place in Manhattan’s High School of Music & Art in the mid-1960s. This experience, as she notes in this deeply personal recollection, left her with a sense of “self-doubt” that “spilled over into my love life, where inhibition and love addiction put romantic stability out of reach.” This search for identity corresponded with her arrival at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was “caught up in the counterculture tsunami” of experimentation with sex and psychedelic drugs. Later, after dropping out of Berkeley, she would return to college, where she took an art class and learned to make egg tempera paint. This life-altering course not only impacted the direction of Arbrador’s art, but also her entire life. The process by which the paint is made—mixing an egg with powdered pigment—was like “alchemy” to the author, who was drawn to its “ethereal quality.” Taking on a job as a nurse to supplement her artistic career, Arbrador would continue to explore new modalities of self-expression, from activism in the feminist health care movements of the ’70s to participation in San Francisco’s sex underground in the ’80s.

Her sexuality, varied lovers, and experimentation at sex parties during the era of the AIDS epidemic are addressed explicitly yet tastefully in the work’s narrative. Balancing the raw honesty and titillating storytelling of the memoir-based chapters are others that take readers into the technical aspects of her art. Arbrador, who has lectured on egg tempera at Cornell University and is the co-founder of the Society of Tempera Painters, is perhaps one of the world’s foremost specialists on the process, and shares her impassioned expertise in a jargon-free writing style to those unfamiliar with the method. The volume concludes with a captivating essay on the history of egg tempera art, from neolithic and Bronze Age works to the 20th century’s most well-known egg tempera painter, Andrew Wyeth. Well-researched, this essay, as well as the volume’s broad exploration of the egg tempera process, is accompanied by a network of more than 100 scholarly endnotes. As intriguing as Arbrador’s memoir may be, and as informative as her overview of egg tempera is, the highlight of this book is the author’s artwork itself. Gorgeously designed, the volume features high-resolution, full-color (and often full-page) prints of the author’s extensive collection of works since the ’70s, in addition to a myriad of photographs and other visual elements. This is not just an enthralling, erotic read that gently pushes readers to encounter uncomfortable topics, but a visual delight and summation of Arbrador’s eclectic life as well.

A beautifully designed and engrossing homage to the life-changing power of art.