It all started one night when I was cooking dinner and, I cut up a green pepper. And, you know, I guess maybe artists are a different kind of people because instead of just thinking about what was going to happen to the pepper, I looked at it. And, there was an absolutely incredible scene in front of me and my knife.

I literally was blown away by the way the seeds were inside of that pepper.

I normally cut up a pepper, get rid of the seeds, put it in a frying pan, and that’s the end of it.

Well, I looked at this green pepper. Really for the first time in my life. I had cut up many of them. And, I thought I had never seen anything like that before. I ran for the camera and started taking photographs.

Discovering a Whole New World

I have found that there is a world inside of these fruits and vegetables that most of us never look at because it all goes in the garbage.

In the beginning, I called this the Seeds Series, because that was the focus. 

And, after I painted about 10 of them, I thought “No, no, no, that’s really lame.” “We’ve got to come up with a better title.” So, it became the Genesis Series for obvious reasons. And so, the Genesis Series has occupied me since 2007. I have done other things.

The History of Egg Tempera Paintings

These paintings are egg tempera, and not egg tempera, which is an egg dish that the Japanese people eat. But egg tempera, which is an ancient method of making paint. And, it goes way back in history. You know, they found egg tempera paintings in the pyramids and beyond.

I would love to have a conversation with the spirit of whoever it was that got the idea of putting an egg yolk in dirt, which basically is what paint is, or paint was. I mean we’ve gotten a little bit more sophisticated than that.

What is absolutely the most amazing part of egg tempera for me is the history that I’m connected not only of painting and making art, but actually finding these amazing pigments. So, it comes to me in a jar or in a baggy of powdered color.

Basically, what it is, if we’re talking about the earth colors that come out of the earth, it is colored by iron oxides and things leaching into the soil that create the colors of ochre and umber and some of the other colors that we’re familiar with.

 From synthetic ingredients, they’re based in the petroleum, coal and that kind of thing. And they’re all made in a laboratory, basically.

But, they come as pigments also. And, you can get things like thelo-cyanide and naphthol and all these chemical sounding names, which are equally as enchanting for me. I’m not a purist. I will paint with whatever is there.

Egg Tempera, the word tempera means to mix. It was an Italian word, I think. To mix. To Temper. To temper your paint. So, you take a little dirt and you put some egg yolk in it. And, the egg yolk is a binder. It binds the molecule of the pigment, not only to each other but to the support you are putting it on.

Most people find that you need to work on a rigid panel. I don’t make my own, because that is just an incredibly time-consuming and miserable thing to do. I buy my panes and I have a supplier.

Egg Tempera, Exercise in Patience

The egg tempera painting can be a tedious exercise in unbelievable patience. You can’t change them. So, you better know before you start what you’re gonna paint and how it’s gonna go together. After a while, you learn that you just have to pay attention before you ever begin to get your stuff all organized.

You can make changes actually. It’s not true that you can’t. But it is a… Let’s put this way, it is temperamental, like artists are. It’s not easy to be spontaneous in egg tempera, which is one of the reasons people who are used to working in acrylics or oil painting with great big brushes of paint, just absolutely cannot stand working in egg tempera.

The history of egg tempera is that when oil paint was invented, more or less in the Renaissance, artists went to use that because it was way easier to do it. And so, egg tempera just sort of fell out of use until the end of the 19^th century. There was a lady in Great Britain that got interested in it and slowly there has been a movement that has revived the whole medium. So, that there are lots of people working in egg tempera.

Now, you can find them online. There’s a Facebook group of egg tempera painters that is very useful. If you are interested in egg tempera, there’s lots of information on it. I do workshops. I’m gonna do a workshop here in it. Click here for information on the workshop.

I just really want to thank the Dunedin Fine Art Center and Catherine (Bergmann) for asking me to do the show. It really was a major deal in my life. So thank you, dear.

– Gainor Roberts