Eggs over Brighton. A Christmas Miracle

I quietly restarted my art practice back in November. I began with eggs.

Drawing and painting eggs in a still life is a long standing traditional way for painters to develop their skills. Eggs look simple, but their oblong shape and slightly reflective surface make them a great subject for learning to observe and reproduce value and color. Eggs cast great looking shadows and reflect bits of color from all around them.

What I’m saying is “dude, have you ever really looked at an egg? I mean really looked it?”

These eggs are from Spain. We travelled this summer to Ireland, England, and Spain. On the last leg of our trip we stayed in an apartment in Seville. We bought eggs for breakfast, and since these are European eggs from vaccinated chickens they haven’t been power-washed. The shell remains air-tight. American eggs are scrubbed so hard the shells become porous and must be refrigerated. Compare an egg from a farmer’s market to an egg from your grocery store and you can easily see and feel the difference. My eggs lived in a ceramic bowl on the kitchen counter across from the alien washing machine. I took some reference photos in hopes of painting again.

Once I had my eggs painted, I created a giant digital collage which I posted to Instagram in tiny pieces. These eggs now float over the stoney beach at Brighton, England. The reference photo makes an appearance at the very bottom, digitally scrambled with the tide. (Note: add more egg puns here)

Now the seal has broken and I’m making art again. Painting digitally, but now printing out those images on canvas and painting physically on top. I’m also posting everything to Instagram in giant grids as before, however I also got smart and reproduced my grids on my personal website so that when Instagram finally does something too awful to suffer through, I’ll still have my pics.