Art & Love: My Life Illuminated in Egg Tempera - Paperback

by Lora Arbrador (Author)

"She paints the world she knows--taboo, tender, and utterly alive."

Art & Love is an intimate, unflinching memoir of an artist's life shaped by the counterculture of the Sixties and beyond, devotion to craft, and the quest for mastery and lasting love.

Amidst self-doubt and romantic intrigue, the author commits herself to the demanding practice of egg tempera painting--a rare art form she considers her artistic soul. Her journey includes communal living that ranges from the benign to the cult-like, forays into San Francisco's sex underground, and work as a nurse during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, experiences that inspire frank visual and narrative depictions of death and dying, intimacy, and bodily experience that will resonate most with unsqueamish readers.

Luminous artwork appears throughout, documenting the passage of time and reflecting an artist's resilience and self-discovery in sustaining a creative life.

For more information, visit the author's website at arbrador.com.

--Lora Arbrador

Author Biography

At the age of 19, Lora Arbrador was given a recipe for making egg tempera paint, a luminous but challenging medium practiced from antiquity to the present. Like a musician drawn to a particular instrument, she found her creative home in egg tempera.

To support her art practice, Arbrador became a registered nurse, and the medical world has inspired many of her paintings, which explore themes of mortality, sensuality, and the celebration of bodily functions. Her painting Don't Go My Friend: The Death of John Walsh won first place at the Art and Healing exhibition at ArtWest Gallery.Captivated by the history of egg tempera, Arbrador was invited to speak at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in 1995. Her presentation, Botticelli's Forgotten Medium: Egg Tempera Past and Present, has since been shared with a wide range of audiences.In 1997, she co-founded the Society of Tempera Painters, modeled after the 1901 Society of Painters in Tempera in England. Her first book, A History of Roman Calligraphy, is housed in the Stern Book Arts & Special Collections Center at the San Francisco Public Library.Arbrador's studio is in San Francisco, California, USA.