Art & Love

Art & Love is the memoir of a woman’s quest to master the ancient art of egg tempera painting, gain confidence as an artist and find lasting love.

It’s 1966 and unaware that a counterculture tsunami is brewing, Lora Arbrador arrives in Berkeley, California where she is introduced to egg tempera, a painting technique that combines colorful pigments with egg yolk. Lora falls in love with this luminous medium but cannot find a teacher to unravel its mysteries. Her love life is similarly marked with many failures.

Art and love converge when she falls for a tender, charismatic artist, but after their eight-month immersion in the great museums of Europe, Lora follows him into a commune that she later realizes has become a cult.

Set against a backdrop of huge cultural changes – from the counterculture of the 1960s and back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, to the AIDS epidemic and sex underground of the 1980s – Art & Love is a journey of creative and emotional fulfillment that captivates, educates and entertains the reader.

Arbrador’s stunning artwork enhances the narrative, inspiring those grappling with their own artistic expression and longing for love.

Includes her bonus essay “Which Came First? A Taste of Egg Tempera History.”

• Editor's Pick BookLife ReviewsCommended 2025

Editor’s Pick – BookLife Review by Publishers Weekly

Art & Love: My Life Illuminated in Egg Tempera

Pull quotes:  

“Alive with her insights, passions, and a personal history that connects to urgent cultural and feminist history.”

“A gorgeous, heartfelt examination and celebration.”

“Bold, inviting paintings abound… The result is inspiring and informative, a book to be pored over.”

FULL REVIEW:

Abrador’s luminous book invites readers into her life, art, and determination to master the ancient art of egg tempera painting, a technique dating from before the era of oil painting that blends “colorful pigments with egg yolk.” For Abrador, this was, like many obsessions, love at first sight, beginning in a college class and soon inspiring her quest to master an art most have never heard of—and few were able to teach. (Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World is a modern example that showcases the “ethereal” quality and “inner glow.”) Art & Love isn’t quite an exegesis of her work in that medium, and it isn’t quite a memoir, nor a comprehensive history of the art itself. Instead, it blends vital elements of all of these and more, coming together into a gorgeous, heartfelt examination and celebration. It’s all beautifully illustrated with Abrador’s own work, while the prose is alive with her insights, passions, and a personal history that connects to urgent cultural and feminist history.

Abrador was a witness and participant in watershed moments of the late 20th century, among them the Bay Area’s countercultural flowering, where hippie culture was “no paradise for women,” and the AIDS epidemic, which Abrador captures in a touching essay and intimate portraiture. Abrador is present in every paragraph, and the result echoes what a patron once said of her art: “There is pain but there is hope.” That’s Art & Love in a nutshell. Her personal accounts of life in fraught times—she has been a nurse for 50 years—are supplemented by introductions to paintmaking, a celebration of the slowness of egg tempera work, a brisk breakdown of the history of egg tempera throughout the Neolithic Era, the Bronze Age, the Byzantine Empire, and onward.

Bold, inviting paintings abound: portraits of family and friends; radiant yoga nudes; earthy couplings; frank and surprising depictions of the body in surgery, menstruation, and other deeply human experiences. The result is inspiring and informative, a book to be pored over.

Takeaway: Beautiful, inspiring memoir of a life of egg-tempera painting.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A