Art & Love

“She paints the world she knows—taboo, tender, and utterly alive.”

Art & Love is an intimate, unflinching memoir of an artist’s life shaped by the counterculture of the Sixties and beyond, devotion to craft, and the quest for mastery and lasting love.

Amidst self-doubt and romantic intrigue, the author commits herself to the demanding practice of egg tempera painting—a rare art form she considers her artistic soul. Her journey includes communal living that ranges from the benign to the cult-like, forays into San Francisco’s sex underground, and work as a nurse during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, experiences that inspire frank visual and narrative depictions of death and dying, intimacy, and bodily experience that will resonate most with unsqueamish readers.

Luminous artwork appears throughout, documenting the passage of time and reflecting an artist’s resilience and self-discovery in sustaining a creative life. 

For more information, visit the author’s website at arbrador.com.

• Nonfiction Book Awards — SilverWinner 2025

Editor’s Pick – BookLife Reviews by Publishers Weekly

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