Art & Love
My Life Illuminated in Egg Tempera
A vibrant coffee-table book, Art & Love is an idiosyncratic artist’s retrospective that gathers personal favorites from a lifetime of creative work.
Artist Lora Arbrador’s earthy monograph Art & Love features self-portraits, drawings, and egg tempera paintings alongside vignettes from her adventure-filled life.
Her narration humble and matter of fact, Arbrador asserts that she showed no particular aptitude for painting as a child. Still, her passion for the arts led her to university studies. Herein, she gathers a selection of her works, many of which were informed by her career in nursing. With subjects including the AIDS epidemic, menstruation, motherhood, and sexuality, the pieces center human bodies. Often, their line work is delicate; some compositions are surrealistic and draw from religious iconography.
Colorful anecdotes are paired with Arbrador’s personal favorites from her oeuvre, as with stories about her brushes with the counterculture, lovers, and experiments with drugs. Her unconventional background included a spell living in a homemade tent in rural Maine; she joined a commune in the 1980s. Throughout, her sources of inspiration grew. She abstained from making art in some periods of her life and experienced intermittent doubt—all details that are used to flesh out her artistic process.
The images are curated according to theme and series and are reproduced in full color. In Milk Flowing into an Urn, a nude woman lactates while reading. In Limb to Limb, a woman hangs upside down from a tree, naked and serene; the image is accompanied by a poem of the same name, written by Ilse Lehnert:
peaks and valleys
woman’s depths
bowing to
demands of life
take root
bloom
Arbrador’s self-portraits across time showcase her increasing skill and tendency toward experimentation—the fruit of her continuous practice and openness to personal reinvention. The pieces are also paired with supplementary text that explains their origins and meanings, with autobiographical details and photographs sprinkled in for context.
Throughout the book, informative sidebars are devoted to topics like the pigments used in egg tempera, the intricacies of preparing surfaces with gesso, and people who inspired Arbrador, including German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker and her personal mentors. Mentions of well-known paintings that belong to the egg tempera tradition, including Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, and a brief history of egg tempera itself prove expansive. Discursions to topics including the 1840s Oneida community and its leader and BDSM communities shift the book’s focus too much, though, causing portions of it to meander.
Art & Love is an eclectic and revealing artist’s monograph in which self-discoveries are mirrored in a variety of reproduced pieces.
Reviewed by
Karen Rigby
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
