Obviously there are grocery store eggs and there are eggs direct from a farm. Sure, I know that, you know that, etc. But wow, really, what a difference. Farm eggs are beautiful! Eggs are pretty cool in general, but lemme get specific…
Since moving to Napanee I’ve been able to get my hands on a lot of farm fresh eggs. Which has been amazing taste-wise, but I’ve been struck by the shells even before I got around to eating them (I suppose you have to strike the shells before you eat them… I’ll try not to make too many egg puns in this post). Of course this comes up a lot– there are all of my bread paintings. Staring at a fresh loaf of bread for hours before eating it can be a real exercise in restraint. Though I haven’t painted a cooked egg yet.
Yet.
So anyhow, what I’m getting at here is egg paintings. Three of them! And it should be noted that as I am writing this, I realized that there is yet another unfinished egg painting on my easel, but that will have to be a post for another day.
The subtlety and also somehow intensity of the shell colours really got to me. The robin’s egg blue is just a lovely colour. I find that blue doesn’t often occur naturally (other than the sky) but when it does it’s moving… to me, that is. And of course with the quail eggs scale and differences in size come into play. The lovely speckling. That was the first painting, a simple start on a sheet of my favourite mineral paper.
The second one here is unfinished, but that’s ok, it was maybe a bit too ambitious. It’s a solid underpainting and I still got to mix the egg colours that fascinated me. I think I abandoned this one because I wasn’t sure I should leave all these eggs unrefrigerated for so long. You get a lot of conflicting opinions on egg storage if you look it up, so it was a better-safe-than-sorry thing. Plus it would be awful to let any of them go bad.
And finally the third painting. It was sometime in December that I finished this one, I guess one of my last paintings of 2024. I must have gotten over my fear of leaving the eggs out. I ate them all in the end, so it turned out to be fine. Good to know for 2025’s eggs! Maybe I’ll even get into cracked-egg paintings. Not to be confused with tempera. Lil’ paint joke for ya there.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve painted a loaf of bread and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Eggs and bread in the same still life would be fun… that’s one of my favourite combinations outside of art. We’ll just have to hope that the perfect loaf and the right egg come along at the same time.