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He announced these students that had submitted outstanding projects, and I was one of them. Wow. So that was the first time I felt really recognized. And he gave us a page from an antique book of spider illustrations. That was our prize.
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Yay.
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Yeah. And told him that I planned to become a nurse. And his exact words were, that's a tragedy. He meant that I would be giving up my art. And that sticks with me. Just that he believed in me. And also, I kind of worry about it. I'm still a nurse, and I worry that maybe I should have just stuck with pure art. Then I started thinking, you know, maybe I'll never get back to it. I'm in my 70s. Maybe this is my body of work. I knew something was missing, but I just kind of surrendered to it. But I became very depressed. I started doing some journaling, and it became totally obvious that I had to start painting again.
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Hi, I'm Claire. For this podcast, I chat with people who have found or refound their creativity as adults. We'll explore their childhood experiences of the arts, discuss how they came to the artistic practices they now love, and consider the barriers they may have experienced between the two. We'll also explore what it is that people value and gain from their newfound artistic pursuits.
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This time, I'm chatting with Lora Arbrador. Hello, Lora. How are you?
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Hello. I'm well. How are you doing, Claire?
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I'm very well, thank you. Start by telling us about your current creative outlet, please.
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Well, currently I'm working on my egg tempera paintings, and I'm really happy to be painting again. I had to take a break when I was working on my book, but I'm at it every morning, and it's quite wonderful.
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We're going to find out a bit more about that medium because I'm sure that's not one that everybody knows straight off, but let's go back to your childhood. Did creative activities of any sort play a part in your life when you were younger, at home or at school?
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Yeah, well, when I was very young, I don't remember anything creative. I was just admired for being sweet and pretty. I just remember that it was the 50s. My sister was very, very talented, my mother very talented, and I was very well loved. I didn't feel neglected, and I didn't think I needed any creativity. But my parents were very much involved in the arts, so they thought that children should have lessons and become creative. So they sent me for piano lessons, which was pretty dismal. And I remember one concert that I flubbed the notes and I Was crying. It was terrible. And then modern dance, which was also not a big success. So finally they sent me two lessons with Ruth Brody, who was a friend of theirs, a very accomplished watercolour artist. And she had a tiny little studio in her basement, and there were maybe three students. At that point, we were already in middle school. So I just did whatever she told us to do. And I don't really still to this day, I don't understand what happened, But I just became fascinated with art. And she was very, very patient. And she treated us like an adult. She took me seriously, so I started to take myself seriously. And even right now, when I paint, I hear her voice. She was very detail oriented, which I tend to be very sloppy. And she would just tell me how to be more precise. And that really was the start of. It was lessons with Ruth Brody.
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Oh, well, that was good that you found that something. Did you continue with an art education, like in secondary school, into college, anything like that?
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Yeah. So at that point, I applied for admission to the High School of Music and Art, which was a public high school in Manhattan. I lived in the Bronx, and we had to take a test and prepare a portfolio, and she helped us with that. And so I did go to the High School of Music and Art, and I studied painting, printmaking, and drawing, of course. So I did do quite a bit of art in high school. My parents, they were happy that I found something that I liked, but they didn't really think I was very good. So I didn't get a lot of encouragement. When I was a senior, they had an art show, and one of my paintings won an honorable mention in the show. I didn't really like the painting, but I guess they thought it was good. My father was kind of, like, bewildered why it won a prize. He didn't really say anything, but I could tell that he didn't really think much of it. To this day, I feel a little bit sad because that could have been an opportunity to bolster my confidence, but it didn't happen. I did put that painting in my book. And somebody who was a beta reader, an early reader, she said she really liked the painting and that it looked like somebody older had painted it. So decades later, I'm seeing some beauty in that painting that I didn't see before.
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Did you think confidence was an issue generally for you when you were younger?
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Oh, that's a good question. I think so. I think I was shy, but I don't remember being really depressed or anything like that. But I didn't feel that I was very confident. The high school I went to had older kids because in the Bronx, we skipped a grade. In middle school, we had a choice of taking three years or two years in middle school, and I took two years. So when I got to high school, there were a lot of kids that were older. And because it was such a good public school, a lot of parents pulled their kids out of private school and put them in there. And they were very sophisticated. Their parents were filmmakers and gynecologists. And so I felt kind of less than in high school, but I guess everybody has a hard time in high school.
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Yeah. And then. So that sounds super to be surrounded by art at high school. What about after high school?
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Well, what happened was my father was a teacher, and he had opportunities in the summer for enrichment programs. And he got an opportunity to go to the University of California at Berkeley. And he said if I didn't get a summer job, I would have to go with him and my mother, too. And of course, I never got the summer job and I had to go with him. But he did arrange for me to take classes at the university in art. And I just fell in love with the University of California at Berkeley. And I kind of gave them an ultimatum that if I couldn't go there, I was not going to go to college at all, which was really pretty extreme because it was 3,000 miles away. And I was only 17 when I graduated high school. So then I went to college, and at that point, the hippie movement had not started. It was the free speech movement, and my parents liked the free speech movement, so they thought it was fine. But as soon as I got there, it was the whole flower power, the whole tsunami of counterculture was happening in full swing. And I was pretty young, and I got totally sucked into it. And it wasn't like it was so this wonderful, fun thing. It was pretty scary in a way. I didn't know what was going on, but it was also exciting. My boyfriend took me to the Fillmore, and I heard Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. I thought they were just our local bands. I had no idea how iconic they were. It was amazing. There were light shows, and it was pretty amazing. So pretty soon, after a year, I dropped out of college because Timothy Leary was the big guru, and he said, turn on, tune in and drop out. And I took it literally. I was programmed my whole life to go to school and then summer camp, and I just wanted to try just being. I didn't want to have any goals or schedules. So I left the university after a year and my parents cut me off financially, which I think was pretty smart of them. So I got a part time job scooping ice cream and at Swensons. And I just wandered around Berkeley just, just being like I wanted to for several months. That's all I did. But after a while I started painting again, just little watercolours. And I realized that I really wanted to still do art. So I got the brilliant idea that if I went back to school, my parents would start sending me money again and I wouldn't have to have a part time job. So I did that. I went back to school taking art classes and the first class I took was called Materials and Methods with Boyd Allen. I still remember the teacher. One day he gave us a piece of paper that was a recipe for painting technique called egg tempera, where you mix egg yolk with powdered pigments. And it just really, really captured me. I bought materials for making gesso. Gesso is the ground or the primer, like a plaster primer. And pigments are coloured powders. And there's something about it. It's just very, very absorbent. Just putting the colours on it was very magical. And at that point I just fell in love with the technique. So that was the start of it.
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Do you have control over the density of the colour? Like if you've got the pigments, if you're using more pigment and less pigment, do you have that kind of colour mixing or maybe opacity and translucence, translucentness of the material? Do you have control over that?
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Yes, you do. But it's quite difficult in tempera because the paints are all rather translucent. So it's hard to build up the body. So we learned to add a little bit of white, which adds an opacity to it. You don't want to add too much because it looks chalky. So you learn how to do that. And then there are a lot of glazes that you do. And when you do the glazing, you use the pure colour. But it is something kind of difficult to learn to control. If you use too much water, it can seep into the gesso and make a hole. Beginners are like, oh my God, what's going on here? One of my teachers called dressing down your brush. You have to wipe off the brush with every stroke that you make to get rid of the excess water. Although there is a technique that uses a lot of water, which is called Little Lake Petit Lac in French. I'm doing a lot of experiments with that now.
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Wow.
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Did you graduate from Berkeley. Did you continue with your education this time?
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No. At that point, yeah, I felt it was just too big for me. It was like a factory. It still is. People think it's the best school, but I thought it was way too big, especially for me. And the University of California at Santa Cruz was just getting started, and it's actually based on the Oxford Cambridge model, which you'll be very familiar with.
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I am.
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And they hired Jasper Rose, who's a graduate of Cambridge, and he helped to bring that system over to UC Santa Cruz. I found out I could be a visiting transfer student, so I transferred to Santa Cruz. And that was when I connected with professors who really saw something in my art. And one of them was actually Jasper Rhodes, the flamboyant professor. He used to wear a cape and a cane at every lecture. And I took a class about the Arts and Crafts movement of England with him. So for our final paper, we could either write a paper or we could do a project that represented the Arts and Crafts movement. So I wrote a paper that turned out to really be like a small book called the History of Roman Calligraphy. And I had taken calligraphy lessons, so I hand calligraphed the book. So then at the last class, he announced the students that had submitted outstanding projects, and I was one of them.
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Wow.
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So that was the first time I felt really recognized. And he gave us a page from an antique book of spider illustrations. That was our prize.
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Yay.
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Yeah.
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That's what I've always wanted. Yeah.
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And the other professor who was just as influential for me was Hardy Hanson. And he just took us very seriously. And I did a lot of work in his class. The thing that happened, I guess I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself after. Oh, I did go back to Berkeley because I was not allowed to finish at UC Santa Cruz. I was too close to my senior year, so I did finish at Berkeley. Then I decided to become a nurse because I pretty much knew I was not going to support myself as an artist. What related to Hardy Hanson was that a year after I graduated, I went to Back to California and visited him and told him that I planned to become a nurse. And his exact words were, that's a tragedy. And he meant that I would be giving up my art or not taking it seriously. And that sticks with me so often. Just that he believed in me. And also, I kind of worry about it. I'm still a nurse, and I worry that maybe I should have just stuck with pure art. So that was very transformative Those two teachers were a big turning point for me.
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Yeah. So why did you decide that nursing could be what you could do if you weren't confident in making a career in art, which most people are not confident in? Why nursing?
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It was a series of things that happened. For one thing, I became interested in mental illness and how mentally ill people might be more creative. It's never really been proven, but I always think of Van Gogh, who was certified mentally ill. And I just got this idea that perhaps I could work with mentally ill people and give them very professional art supplies. Because in institutional settings, they usually have crappy paints and crayons. And so I went to this large institution in Napa, Psychiatric Institution, and I asked them if I could do some work with some of their patients. And I don't know why they said yes, because at that point, I had no professional credentials. But they said yes. And I brought some. I think they were oil pastels and good paper. And I really liked what they did. I felt that was a good experiment, but I still had no idea about a profession. And a few weeks later, I went with a boyfriend who was doing his internship at a community mental health clinic. And I was just kind of observing, and I saw the patients sitting around talking to these women. And they didn't have a name tag or anything. I didn't know what they were. And I just said to myself, well, that's something I could do. I could talk to people who were having problems. I didn't think of becoming a therapist, but I asked somebody, who are these women? And they said, they're registered nurses. And I thought that a nurse had to have a white cap and all that kind of stereotype. So that's what really kind of opened my eyes to it. I thought, oh, wow, that's something I could do. But I also looked into some other fields, like medical illustration and art therapy. But nursing's a very versatile field. You can do all kinds of different things within nursing. So I decided to just go to nursing school.
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And in that versatile field, in your nursing career, what kind of roles did you do?
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Yeah, I did many roles. I remember one. I was in a mall piercing people's ears. They wanted the customers to think that a nurse was doing it, that it would be more sanitary or something. That was one of the weird. The weirder things I did. But I did so many different things. I was only a regular floor nurse for a short time. I worked a lot in clinics. One of my latest roles was helping patients with their opioid medicines. And I did a lot of research, nursing. That got me into the research during the AIDS epidemic. That relates a lot to my art. But I also had an interesting gig as an editorial director of a nursing magazine. But just, yeah, so many different things. I've worked a lot in women's health, women's clinics. I was an advice nurse. I was a nurse practitioner. So, yeah, many, many, many, many things. And I'm still working in a clinic right now. My role is called care manager, which is like a case manager, but you've kind of put together a lot of different problems that the person has and steer them into the right place where they should be in the system. I feel comfortable with that role, and I only do it one or two days a week now.
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Do tell me then about starting to paint again. How did that come about?
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During nursing school, I really couldn't paint. It was very, very intense. And then I moved back to California. I went to nursing school in New York, moved to California, kind of chasing an old boyfriend. And when I got here, he was with somebody else, so that was not fun. But I did live with one of my friends from nursing school, and I started volunteering at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. And then I got a job there. And this was in the late 70s, and some of our treatments for sexually transmitted diseases were not working very well. And then we got word that there was a strange cancer spreading among gay men in San Francisco. And within another few months, it was termed AIDS Acquired Immune Deficiency disease. And it was devastating. Just all of these men were dying within six months. It was really devastating. Eventually, my very close friend from the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, he came down with AIDS and he died. And before that, I felt I was pretty scared to work as a nurse around the virus. I was scared of catching it. You'd only catch it from blood or. But still, I was kind of scared. But after he died, I was offered a job in AIDS research, and I took the job. And it was kind of risky because I did a lot of blood drawing, but I was very safe about it. And one day a patient of mine said, I'm dropping out of your study and I'm dropping out of life and I'm having a going away party and I'd like you to come. So what he was basically saying was he was going to kill himself because he'd seen too many of his friends die in agony, and he was already having a lot of symptoms, and he knew that if he was going to do that, he had to do it now. So I tried to talk him out of it, but he had his mind made up. He had a therapist and a lot of friends. And so I decided to go to his going away party. I got there and it was just amazing. There were just flowers and candles and a lot of people crying, a lot of people laughing. And he was just very sweet. He took my coat. And then on the table there was a cake inscribed Bon Voyage, Tom, because he was going to kill himself. And the plan was that whoever was left at dawn would be the witness to his suicide. And I decided not to stay. But I asked a friend of his if I could call her and make sure that everything went okay. I called her a few days later, and she said that he lay back in the arms of his friend and his lover, read him a bedtime story, and then he took the fatal dose of pills. And in a half hour he was asleep. And then in two hours, he died. And after I heard that story, an idea for a painting came to my mind. And so the painting has the cake with the bon voyage, and he's holding the pills. And it's a fairly large painting. It took me six years to make. And I also did a painting of my friend who died of aids, of him in the hospital, in the hospital bed. And that painting actually won an award. I did another painting of another friend who passed away from aids. And all there were four paintings that I did. I went on to do more AIDS research. My boss in the last AIDS research study, he died many years later. And that was my most recent painting. Very, very large painting, 4ft by 8ft. So those are the four paintings that I think are the most influential paintings that I've made. And they were from the AIDS epidemic and directly related to my nursing career. But then I went on after the AIDS epidemic and did other series. When I had a baby, I did a bunch of paintings and drawings about pregnancy and birth. Some of my subject matter is pretty edgy. I did a lot of bodily functions like menstruation, lactation, even defecation. So my artwork is not for everybody, which is why I decided to put it in a book instead of hanging it on a wall. I thought, oh, it'll be in a book and nobody will be upset by it. But books get banned. That was kind of naive. So basically, I really have to say, this is who I am. It's not for everybody, but a lot of people find it very interesting. And that's how I ended up writing this book.
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I will come back to the book, but I wanted to ask from the place that these paintings are coming from, whether that's the AIDS stories or your own experience, how were you emotionally? Is this helping you emotionally? Is this making you emotional when you're doing it? Like, how do you do it?
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Well, I don't think it really does because I get so caught up in the actual painting process and the drawing. I make a lot of drawings, and it's very difficult, so I'm more involved in that. But I do try to bring out emotion. That's one of the things that I really try to do in my work. Right now I'm working on an idea about immigration. My grandmother's immigration from Poland in 1925, and she knew that she'd never see her mother again. In those days, you didn't fly back and forth when you left. That was it. I heard this story that before she left, she ripped open her dress to kiss her heart because she knew she'd never see her again. And that image. I've made drawings, but I haven't started that painting because I'm working on other ones. But the image, and it does bring tears to my eyes when I think about it. And I think it's helped me a lot just being so grateful to my ancestors who. Who immigrated because a lot of them were killed in the Holocaust, the ones who didn't immigrate. And not just that, but it's more the experience in those days where you wouldn't see your loved ones ever again. And you knew that. Very difficult to paint. But, yeah, I get caught up in the emotion, but I don't really see it as therapeutic so much. Maybe it is.
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Okay. Yeah. Moving on to the book. It started as a collection of captions, I believe, and evolved into your memoir. So tell me about that change.
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A lot of the paintings, especially the AIDS paintings, tell stories. And I always maintain that I'm an artist. I don't need to write anything about my art. The art should speak for itself. That was always what I said. But when I go to a museum, I kind of like to read the text that they put next to the artwork. I had to admit that to myself. So I thought, well, I'll just write down these stories, especially the AIDS paintings. And then when I had an open studios exhibit, I posted the stories next to the paintings, and people were very, very moved by it. They said it really helped them understand the artwork better. So I thought, well, maybe I'll just make a. Not even a book, just something. A collection like that. So I started doing that. But then I Put in more paintings and more paintings. And the paintings had the captions. And I realized that they were telling my life story, the different parts of my life when I lived in a teepee in the woods in Maine. And so I started fleshing it out into a kind of an autobiography, but only related to art. There's a few other things, but mostly related to my art. But then I got connected with an editor and she said, there's no passion here. I don't know who you are. You need to write a lot more. And so that started me really fleshing it out. I didn't know what she meant by passion to write. I thought the passion was in the artwork. So since nobody was going to look at it, I started writing about my love life because I figured, well, that's passion. And that got into my sex life. So then when it was time to meet with her and show her what I had written, I didn't have anything else. So I. I showed her that and I thought she was this very proper English lady. And she, she read it and she said, that's perfect. So she kind of put me up to. To putting in a lot of, shall we say, adult content in the book. Yeah, I went through a lot of back and forth. I showed it to different friends. Some of them said, no, this will be very offensive. And other people said, oh, it's the best part of the book. In the end, some of my work is erotic. Most of it is more sensual. But there are a few pieces and I thought, you know, I want to put them all in there. And once I decided to put in all the artwork, I thought, I'm just going to put in the text that goes along with it.
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You had another hiatus with the painting when you were finishing and promoting the book?
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Yes.
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Was it that work that kind of forced you to stop painting?
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Yes, it was a 10 year process, the book. So at the beginning, I was painting. I usually paint in the morning. It seemed like a nice balance. But the last probably two years of the book, I was working so intensely with my graphic Designer, I had three copy editors, which is a whole other story. 26 beta readers, which I've now found out you're not supposed to have that many beta readers. And it just became a very, very huge, intense project. And it was too stressful to try to paint and do all that. So I just gradually let it go. And at first it was a big relief because painting is really hard. And I thought, wow, this is actually kind of cool. I don't have to paint And I started thinking, you know, maybe I'll never get back to it. I'm in my 70s, maybe this is my body of work. And I knew something was missing, but I just kind of surrendered to it. Then after the book was published, then you had all this publicity and so much you need to do to promote the book. So I. I still couldn't paint, but I became very depressed and I didn't really understand why. I started doing some journaling and it became totally obvious that I had to start painting again. It was really interesting when I started painting again. It has a whole new depth to it now. I feel it's part of my flesh. It's just. It's so deep inside me. The desire or the urge to paint. It's really quite remarkable. And the book really helped me because I have one chapter called Slow Art, which is why I'm such a slow painter. And it talks about the reasons why. And at the end of the chapter, I make peace with it and I say, well, this is just the way I paint. Some people take years to write just one novel, but with art, you're supposed to make 10, 20, 100 paintings a year. But why? Why can't you spend 5, 10 years on one painting? So even though the chapter talks about procrastination, all the reasons why I'm so slow, at the end I make peace with it and I say, well, maybe this is just the way I paint. So it's really helped me. My book. It's like somebody else wrote it and it's giving me advice about how to accept my process. Yeah.
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So now you are back to painting and nursing part time. You said earlier about you used to paint in the morning. Is that something you've come back to do? You have a process and you've also said about the slow painting. So I'm just wondering how, you know, it kind of all fits in with work and painting and anything else in life.
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Well, I only work one or two days a week, so that's very helpful. But I do paint in the morning. But another quirky thing I do is that I paint in my dining room. I have a large dining room, living room that's right next to a little tiny galley kitchen. I find, because the painting is right there, I'll still paint a little bit in the afternoon, even in the evening. So it's just very much a part of me. And of course, I have the egg. The egg has to be fresh, so I keep it in the refrigerator and crack a new egg every few days.
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How long does it last then space wise, you know, how much paint can you get out of an egg?
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Well, because the paint is so dilute, you can get a lot of paint. The only time that I used a lot of egg was when I did this four by eight foot painting and I used house paint rollers to do the background and that I was like, wow, I'm going through a lot of eggs. But ordinarily you don't use very much. I just have a little eyedropper.
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Oh, okay.
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Yeah. But still the egg will tend to go bad. Even if I put it in the refrigerator in a maybe two or three days, you can still use it, but the binding is not as good. It's better to have the fresh egg.
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And then how come it's all right on the surface? Is that because it's so dilute?
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Yes. If you use it very thick, it's going to crack. After I do the egg yolk and you get rid of the egg sac, it's a whole process of rolling the yolk around a paper towel and then you hold it and you puncture it and just have the pure egg yolk come out and you throw away the egg sac and then you mix it with about 50, 50 water, usually distilled water, and shake it up. I should have had my egg medium here to show you it's not something like oil paint where you can make these buttery brushstrokes. That's a limitation of tempera.
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Well, there you go. Now I know that's brilliant. I agree with the having it out there because I used. I learned to play clarinet a while ago and I would leave my clarinet out on a stand rather than packing it up. Because then you can just pick it up.
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Yes.
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And start practicing. Otherwise, if you've got to go to another room or you've got to unpack something, you might just go, oh, well, I won't bother.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Yeah. And is that still big work that you're doing in your dining room?
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Yes, I'm working on another four by eight foot painting. It's huge. And after that, the one about immigration, if I ever get to it, it's going to be even bigger. It'll be double wide, like a double wide trailer. It'll be 8 by 16. I'll have to trim it just enough to get it through the patio door. I say in my book that the painting asks me, it's not like, oh, I want to paint big or something. It's nothing like that. When I get an idea for a painting, it tells me how big it wants to be. It's like the unborn painting is talking to me and it says, I need a, you know, 12 by 16. I need a 4 by 8 foot.
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Yeah.
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So it's, it's a really very magical, mystical almost.
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Where do the completed paintings live?
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Well, I still have most of them and what happened was at the beginning, I didn't. Really wasn't good at selling them. Later on people would want to buy them, but some of them were big or I had worked on them so long, I didn't want to sell them for like $200. So right now I'm toying with the idea of putting them up for adoption.
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Oh.
00:33:26.380 --> 00:34:06.788
Instead of selling them. Because what's more important to me is that they take good care of them as an egg tempera painting and also that they have a legacy. In other words, if the person dies and it goes in a dumpster, it wouldn't be too happy. But if, say, they have children or they know how to donate it to a museum, just somebody that would care for the painting and like in an adoption, adoption is expensive. People do pay the agency and different things, so there would be some money involved. But I'm kind of toying with this. Some of the paintings are in private collections, but most of them are still available. So if anyone wants to adopt one, they can get in touch with me.
00:34:09.030 --> 00:34:14.469
Brilliant. Well, that's absolutely perfect because how can people connect with you, Lora?
00:34:14.469 --> 00:34:35.420
Okay, the easiest way is artandlovebook.com because that is easier to remember than Lora Arbrador. I have several domains that are all connected, so you can be arbrador.com, loraarbrador.com or the simplest one is artandlovebook.com and you can sign up for my substack there.
00:34:36.059 --> 00:34:47.059
Perfect. Thank you so much, Lora. I've really enjoyed not only learning your story, but learning about the techniques of this particular painting. So thank you.
00:34:47.460 --> 00:34:50.659
Thank you so much, Claire. It's been really fun talking with you.
00:34:51.780 --> 00:35:24.510
I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, perhaps you'd like to financially contribute to future episodes at buymeacoffee.com/creativityfound. There's a link in the show Notes. If you are listening on a value for value enabled app such as Fountain, TrueFans or Podcast Guru, feel free to send a few sats my way. And if you have no idea of what I'm talking about, you can find out more by listening to my sister podcast called Podcasting 2.0 in Practice,
00:00:08.240 --> 00:00:24.879
He announced these students that had submitted outstanding projects, and I was one of them. Wow. So that was the first time I felt really recognized. And he gave us a page from an antique book of spider illustrations. That was our prize.
00:00:25.199 --> 00:00:25.760
Yay.
00:00:26.320 --> 00:01:06.879
Yeah. And told him that I planned to become a nurse. And his exact words were, that's a tragedy. He meant that I would be giving up my art. And that sticks with me. Just that he believed in me. And also, I kind of worry about it. I'm still a nurse, and I worry that maybe I should have just stuck with pure art. Then I started thinking, you know, maybe I'll never get back to it. I'm in my 70s. Maybe this is my body of work. I knew something was missing, but I just kind of surrendered to it. But I became very depressed. I started doing some journaling, and it became totally obvious that I had to start painting again.
00:01:08.319 --> 00:01:33.930
Hi, I'm Claire. For this podcast, I chat with people who have found or refound their creativity as adults. We'll explore their childhood experiences of the arts, discuss how they came to the artistic practices they now love, and consider the barriers they may have experienced between the two. We'll also explore what it is that people value and gain from their newfound artistic pursuits.
00:01:34.810 --> 00:01:39.370
This time, I'm chatting with Lora Arbrador. Hello, Lora. How are you?
00:01:39.370 --> 00:01:41.688
Hello. I'm well. How are you doing, Claire?
00:01:41.688 --> 00:01:47.290
I'm very well, thank you. Start by telling us about your current creative outlet, please.
00:01:47.608 --> 00:02:02.180
Well, currently I'm working on my egg tempera paintings, and I'm really happy to be painting again. I had to take a break when I was working on my book, but I'm at it every morning, and it's quite wonderful.
00:02:02.900 --> 00:02:20.419
We're going to find out a bit more about that medium because I'm sure that's not one that everybody knows straight off, but let's go back to your childhood. Did creative activities of any sort play a part in your life when you were younger, at home or at school?
00:02:21.340 --> 00:03:53.560
Yeah, well, when I was very young, I don't remember anything creative. I was just admired for being sweet and pretty. I just remember that it was the 50s. My sister was very, very talented, my mother very talented, and I was very well loved. I didn't feel neglected, and I didn't think I needed any creativity. But my parents were very much involved in the arts, so they thought that children should have lessons and become creative. So they sent me for piano lessons, which was pretty dismal. And I remember one concert that I flubbed the notes and I Was crying. It was terrible. And then modern dance, which was also not a big success. So finally they sent me two lessons with Ruth Brody, who was a friend of theirs, a very accomplished watercolour artist. And she had a tiny little studio in her basement, and there were maybe three students. At that point, we were already in middle school. So I just did whatever she told us to do. And I don't really still to this day, I don't understand what happened, But I just became fascinated with art. And she was very, very patient. And she treated us like an adult. She took me seriously, so I started to take myself seriously. And even right now, when I paint, I hear her voice. She was very detail oriented, which I tend to be very sloppy. And she would just tell me how to be more precise. And that really was the start of. It was lessons with Ruth Brody.
00:03:53.718 --> 00:04:02.438
Oh, well, that was good that you found that something. Did you continue with an art education, like in secondary school, into college, anything like that?
00:04:03.000 --> 00:05:23.838
Yeah. So at that point, I applied for admission to the High School of Music and Art, which was a public high school in Manhattan. I lived in the Bronx, and we had to take a test and prepare a portfolio, and she helped us with that. And so I did go to the High School of Music and Art, and I studied painting, printmaking, and drawing, of course. So I did do quite a bit of art in high school. My parents, they were happy that I found something that I liked, but they didn't really think I was very good. So I didn't get a lot of encouragement. When I was a senior, they had an art show, and one of my paintings won an honorable mention in the show. I didn't really like the painting, but I guess they thought it was good. My father was kind of, like, bewildered why it won a prize. He didn't really say anything, but I could tell that he didn't really think much of it. To this day, I feel a little bit sad because that could have been an opportunity to bolster my confidence, but it didn't happen. I did put that painting in my book. And somebody who was a beta reader, an early reader, she said she really liked the painting and that it looked like somebody older had painted it. So decades later, I'm seeing some beauty in that painting that I didn't see before.
00:05:25.278 --> 00:05:30.069
Did you think confidence was an issue generally for you when you were younger?
00:05:30.709 --> 00:06:17.360
Oh, that's a good question. I think so. I think I was shy, but I don't remember being really depressed or anything like that. But I didn't feel that I was very confident. The high school I went to had older kids because in the Bronx, we skipped a grade. In middle school, we had a choice of taking three years or two years in middle school, and I took two years. So when I got to high school, there were a lot of kids that were older. And because it was such a good public school, a lot of parents pulled their kids out of private school and put them in there. And they were very sophisticated. Their parents were filmmakers and gynecologists. And so I felt kind of less than in high school, but I guess everybody has a hard time in high school.
00:06:17.680 --> 00:06:24.980
Yeah. And then. So that sounds super to be surrounded by art at high school. What about after high school?
00:06:25.540 --> 00:09:53.509
Well, what happened was my father was a teacher, and he had opportunities in the summer for enrichment programs. And he got an opportunity to go to the University of California at Berkeley. And he said if I didn't get a summer job, I would have to go with him and my mother, too. And of course, I never got the summer job and I had to go with him. But he did arrange for me to take classes at the university in art. And I just fell in love with the University of California at Berkeley. And I kind of gave them an ultimatum that if I couldn't go there, I was not going to go to college at all, which was really pretty extreme because it was 3,000 miles away. And I was only 17 when I graduated high school. So then I went to college, and at that point, the hippie movement had not started. It was the free speech movement, and my parents liked the free speech movement, so they thought it was fine. But as soon as I got there, it was the whole flower power, the whole tsunami of counterculture was happening in full swing. And I was pretty young, and I got totally sucked into it. And it wasn't like it was so this wonderful, fun thing. It was pretty scary in a way. I didn't know what was going on, but it was also exciting. My boyfriend took me to the Fillmore, and I heard Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. I thought they were just our local bands. I had no idea how iconic they were. It was amazing. There were light shows, and it was pretty amazing. So pretty soon, after a year, I dropped out of college because Timothy Leary was the big guru, and he said, turn on, tune in and drop out. And I took it literally. I was programmed my whole life to go to school and then summer camp, and I just wanted to try just being. I didn't want to have any goals or schedules. So I left the university after a year and my parents cut me off financially, which I think was pretty smart of them. So I got a part time job scooping ice cream and at Swensons. And I just wandered around Berkeley just, just being like I wanted to for several months. That's all I did. But after a while I started painting again, just little watercolours. And I realized that I really wanted to still do art. So I got the brilliant idea that if I went back to school, my parents would start sending me money again and I wouldn't have to have a part time job. So I did that. I went back to school taking art classes and the first class I took was called Materials and Methods with Boyd Allen. I still remember the teacher. One day he gave us a piece of paper that was a recipe for painting technique called egg tempera, where you mix egg yolk with powdered pigments. And it just really, really captured me. I bought materials for making gesso. Gesso is the ground or the primer, like a plaster primer. And pigments are coloured powders. And there's something about it. It's just very, very absorbent. Just putting the colours on it was very magical. And at that point I just fell in love with the technique. So that was the start of it.
00:09:53.830 --> 00:10:11.320
Do you have control over the density of the colour? Like if you've got the pigments, if you're using more pigment and less pigment, do you have that kind of colour mixing or maybe opacity and translucence, translucentness of the material? Do you have control over that?
00:10:11.879 --> 00:11:07.980
Yes, you do. But it's quite difficult in tempera because the paints are all rather translucent. So it's hard to build up the body. So we learned to add a little bit of white, which adds an opacity to it. You don't want to add too much because it looks chalky. So you learn how to do that. And then there are a lot of glazes that you do. And when you do the glazing, you use the pure colour. But it is something kind of difficult to learn to control. If you use too much water, it can seep into the gesso and make a hole. Beginners are like, oh my God, what's going on here? One of my teachers called dressing down your brush. You have to wipe off the brush with every stroke that you make to get rid of the excess water. Although there is a technique that uses a lot of water, which is called Little Lake Petit Lac in French. I'm doing a lot of experiments with that now.
00:11:08.538 --> 00:11:09.019
Wow.
00:11:09.820 --> 00:11:13.980
Did you graduate from Berkeley. Did you continue with your education this time?
00:11:14.460 --> 00:11:35.798
No. At that point, yeah, I felt it was just too big for me. It was like a factory. It still is. People think it's the best school, but I thought it was way too big, especially for me. And the University of California at Santa Cruz was just getting started, and it's actually based on the Oxford Cambridge model, which you'll be very familiar with.
00:11:35.798 --> 00:11:36.440
I am.
00:11:37.320 --> 00:12:39.320
And they hired Jasper Rose, who's a graduate of Cambridge, and he helped to bring that system over to UC Santa Cruz. I found out I could be a visiting transfer student, so I transferred to Santa Cruz. And that was when I connected with professors who really saw something in my art. And one of them was actually Jasper Rhodes, the flamboyant professor. He used to wear a cape and a cane at every lecture. And I took a class about the Arts and Crafts movement of England with him. So for our final paper, we could either write a paper or we could do a project that represented the Arts and Crafts movement. So I wrote a paper that turned out to really be like a small book called the History of Roman Calligraphy. And I had taken calligraphy lessons, so I hand calligraphed the book. So then at the last class, he announced the students that had submitted outstanding projects, and I was one of them.
00:12:39.320 --> 00:12:39.798
Wow.
00:12:40.120 --> 00:12:50.210
So that was the first time I felt really recognized. And he gave us a page from an antique book of spider illustrations. That was our prize.
00:12:51.090 --> 00:12:51.649
Yay.
00:12:52.210 --> 00:12:52.769
Yeah.
00:12:53.649 --> 00:12:55.808
That's what I've always wanted. Yeah.
00:12:57.889 --> 00:14:07.360
And the other professor who was just as influential for me was Hardy Hanson. And he just took us very seriously. And I did a lot of work in his class. The thing that happened, I guess I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself after. Oh, I did go back to Berkeley because I was not allowed to finish at UC Santa Cruz. I was too close to my senior year, so I did finish at Berkeley. Then I decided to become a nurse because I pretty much knew I was not going to support myself as an artist. What related to Hardy Hanson was that a year after I graduated, I went to Back to California and visited him and told him that I planned to become a nurse. And his exact words were, that's a tragedy. And he meant that I would be giving up my art or not taking it seriously. And that sticks with me so often. Just that he believed in me. And also, I kind of worry about it. I'm still a nurse, and I worry that maybe I should have just stuck with pure art. So that was very transformative Those two teachers were a big turning point for me.
00:14:07.678 --> 00:14:20.320
Yeah. So why did you decide that nursing could be what you could do if you weren't confident in making a career in art, which most people are not confident in? Why nursing?
00:14:20.798 --> 00:16:10.918
It was a series of things that happened. For one thing, I became interested in mental illness and how mentally ill people might be more creative. It's never really been proven, but I always think of Van Gogh, who was certified mentally ill. And I just got this idea that perhaps I could work with mentally ill people and give them very professional art supplies. Because in institutional settings, they usually have crappy paints and crayons. And so I went to this large institution in Napa, Psychiatric Institution, and I asked them if I could do some work with some of their patients. And I don't know why they said yes, because at that point, I had no professional credentials. But they said yes. And I brought some. I think they were oil pastels and good paper. And I really liked what they did. I felt that was a good experiment, but I still had no idea about a profession. And a few weeks later, I went with a boyfriend who was doing his internship at a community mental health clinic. And I was just kind of observing, and I saw the patients sitting around talking to these women. And they didn't have a name tag or anything. I didn't know what they were. And I just said to myself, well, that's something I could do. I could talk to people who were having problems. I didn't think of becoming a therapist, but I asked somebody, who are these women? And they said, they're registered nurses. And I thought that a nurse had to have a white cap and all that kind of stereotype. So that's what really kind of opened my eyes to it. I thought, oh, wow, that's something I could do. But I also looked into some other fields, like medical illustration and art therapy. But nursing's a very versatile field. You can do all kinds of different things within nursing. So I decided to just go to nursing school.
00:16:11.399 --> 00:16:16.519
And in that versatile field, in your nursing career, what kind of roles did you do?
00:16:17.058 --> 00:17:30.867
Yeah, I did many roles. I remember one. I was in a mall piercing people's ears. They wanted the customers to think that a nurse was doing it, that it would be more sanitary or something. That was one of the weird. The weirder things I did. But I did so many different things. I was only a regular floor nurse for a short time. I worked a lot in clinics. One of my latest roles was helping patients with their opioid medicines. And I did a lot of research, nursing. That got me into the research during the AIDS epidemic. That relates a lot to my art. But I also had an interesting gig as an editorial director of a nursing magazine. But just, yeah, so many different things. I've worked a lot in women's health, women's clinics. I was an advice nurse. I was a nurse practitioner. So, yeah, many, many, many, many things. And I'm still working in a clinic right now. My role is called care manager, which is like a case manager, but you've kind of put together a lot of different problems that the person has and steer them into the right place where they should be in the system. I feel comfortable with that role, and I only do it one or two days a week now.
00:17:31.827 --> 00:17:37.509
Do tell me then about starting to paint again. How did that come about?
00:17:38.450 --> 00:22:09.058
During nursing school, I really couldn't paint. It was very, very intense. And then I moved back to California. I went to nursing school in New York, moved to California, kind of chasing an old boyfriend. And when I got here, he was with somebody else, so that was not fun. But I did live with one of my friends from nursing school, and I started volunteering at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. And then I got a job there. And this was in the late 70s, and some of our treatments for sexually transmitted diseases were not working very well. And then we got word that there was a strange cancer spreading among gay men in San Francisco. And within another few months, it was termed AIDS Acquired Immune Deficiency disease. And it was devastating. Just all of these men were dying within six months. It was really devastating. Eventually, my very close friend from the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, he came down with AIDS and he died. And before that, I felt I was pretty scared to work as a nurse around the virus. I was scared of catching it. You'd only catch it from blood or. But still, I was kind of scared. But after he died, I was offered a job in AIDS research, and I took the job. And it was kind of risky because I did a lot of blood drawing, but I was very safe about it. And one day a patient of mine said, I'm dropping out of your study and I'm dropping out of life and I'm having a going away party and I'd like you to come. So what he was basically saying was he was going to kill himself because he'd seen too many of his friends die in agony, and he was already having a lot of symptoms, and he knew that if he was going to do that, he had to do it now. So I tried to talk him out of it, but he had his mind made up. He had a therapist and a lot of friends. And so I decided to go to his going away party. I got there and it was just amazing. There were just flowers and candles and a lot of people crying, a lot of people laughing. And he was just very sweet. He took my coat. And then on the table there was a cake inscribed Bon Voyage, Tom, because he was going to kill himself. And the plan was that whoever was left at dawn would be the witness to his suicide. And I decided not to stay. But I asked a friend of his if I could call her and make sure that everything went okay. I called her a few days later, and she said that he lay back in the arms of his friend and his lover, read him a bedtime story, and then he took the fatal dose of pills. And in a half hour he was asleep. And then in two hours, he died. And after I heard that story, an idea for a painting came to my mind. And so the painting has the cake with the bon voyage, and he's holding the pills. And it's a fairly large painting. It took me six years to make. And I also did a painting of my friend who died of aids, of him in the hospital, in the hospital bed. And that painting actually won an award. I did another painting of another friend who passed away from aids. And all there were four paintings that I did. I went on to do more AIDS research. My boss in the last AIDS research study, he died many years later. And that was my most recent painting. Very, very large painting, 4ft by 8ft. So those are the four paintings that I think are the most influential paintings that I've made. And they were from the AIDS epidemic and directly related to my nursing career. But then I went on after the AIDS epidemic and did other series. When I had a baby, I did a bunch of paintings and drawings about pregnancy and birth. Some of my subject matter is pretty edgy. I did a lot of bodily functions like menstruation, lactation, even defecation. So my artwork is not for everybody, which is why I decided to put it in a book instead of hanging it on a wall. I thought, oh, it'll be in a book and nobody will be upset by it. But books get banned. That was kind of naive. So basically, I really have to say, this is who I am. It's not for everybody, but a lot of people find it very interesting. And that's how I ended up writing this book.
00:22:09.630 --> 00:22:32.750
I will come back to the book, but I wanted to ask from the place that these paintings are coming from, whether that's the AIDS stories or your own experience, how were you emotionally? Is this helping you emotionally? Is this making you emotional when you're doing it? Like, how do you do it?
00:22:32.990 --> 00:23:59.000
Well, I don't think it really does because I get so caught up in the actual painting process and the drawing. I make a lot of drawings, and it's very difficult, so I'm more involved in that. But I do try to bring out emotion. That's one of the things that I really try to do in my work. Right now I'm working on an idea about immigration. My grandmother's immigration from Poland in 1925, and she knew that she'd never see her mother again. In those days, you didn't fly back and forth when you left. That was it. I heard this story that before she left, she ripped open her dress to kiss her heart because she knew she'd never see her again. And that image. I've made drawings, but I haven't started that painting because I'm working on other ones. But the image, and it does bring tears to my eyes when I think about it. And I think it's helped me a lot just being so grateful to my ancestors who. Who immigrated because a lot of them were killed in the Holocaust, the ones who didn't immigrate. And not just that, but it's more the experience in those days where you wouldn't see your loved ones ever again. And you knew that. Very difficult to paint. But, yeah, I get caught up in the emotion, but I don't really see it as therapeutic so much. Maybe it is.
00:24:00.598 --> 00:24:12.358
Okay. Yeah. Moving on to the book. It started as a collection of captions, I believe, and evolved into your memoir. So tell me about that change.
00:24:13.078 --> 00:26:39.759
A lot of the paintings, especially the AIDS paintings, tell stories. And I always maintain that I'm an artist. I don't need to write anything about my art. The art should speak for itself. That was always what I said. But when I go to a museum, I kind of like to read the text that they put next to the artwork. I had to admit that to myself. So I thought, well, I'll just write down these stories, especially the AIDS paintings. And then when I had an open studios exhibit, I posted the stories next to the paintings, and people were very, very moved by it. They said it really helped them understand the artwork better. So I thought, well, maybe I'll just make a. Not even a book, just something. A collection like that. So I started doing that. But then I Put in more paintings and more paintings. And the paintings had the captions. And I realized that they were telling my life story, the different parts of my life when I lived in a teepee in the woods in Maine. And so I started fleshing it out into a kind of an autobiography, but only related to art. There's a few other things, but mostly related to my art. But then I got connected with an editor and she said, there's no passion here. I don't know who you are. You need to write a lot more. And so that started me really fleshing it out. I didn't know what she meant by passion to write. I thought the passion was in the artwork. So since nobody was going to look at it, I started writing about my love life because I figured, well, that's passion. And that got into my sex life. So then when it was time to meet with her and show her what I had written, I didn't have anything else. So I. I showed her that and I thought she was this very proper English lady. And she, she read it and she said, that's perfect. So she kind of put me up to. To putting in a lot of, shall we say, adult content in the book. Yeah, I went through a lot of back and forth. I showed it to different friends. Some of them said, no, this will be very offensive. And other people said, oh, it's the best part of the book. In the end, some of my work is erotic. Most of it is more sensual. But there are a few pieces and I thought, you know, I want to put them all in there. And once I decided to put in all the artwork, I thought, I'm just going to put in the text that goes along with it.
00:26:40.650 --> 00:26:48.568
You had another hiatus with the painting when you were finishing and promoting the book?
00:26:48.970 --> 00:26:49.450
Yes.
00:26:49.690 --> 00:26:52.808
Was it that work that kind of forced you to stop painting?
00:26:53.048 --> 00:29:15.130
Yes, it was a 10 year process, the book. So at the beginning, I was painting. I usually paint in the morning. It seemed like a nice balance. But the last probably two years of the book, I was working so intensely with my graphic Designer, I had three copy editors, which is a whole other story. 26 beta readers, which I've now found out you're not supposed to have that many beta readers. And it just became a very, very huge, intense project. And it was too stressful to try to paint and do all that. So I just gradually let it go. And at first it was a big relief because painting is really hard. And I thought, wow, this is actually kind of cool. I don't have to paint And I started thinking, you know, maybe I'll never get back to it. I'm in my 70s, maybe this is my body of work. And I knew something was missing, but I just kind of surrendered to it. Then after the book was published, then you had all this publicity and so much you need to do to promote the book. So I. I still couldn't paint, but I became very depressed and I didn't really understand why. I started doing some journaling and it became totally obvious that I had to start painting again. It was really interesting when I started painting again. It has a whole new depth to it now. I feel it's part of my flesh. It's just. It's so deep inside me. The desire or the urge to paint. It's really quite remarkable. And the book really helped me because I have one chapter called Slow Art, which is why I'm such a slow painter. And it talks about the reasons why. And at the end of the chapter, I make peace with it and I say, well, this is just the way I paint. Some people take years to write just one novel, but with art, you're supposed to make 10, 20, 100 paintings a year. But why? Why can't you spend 5, 10 years on one painting? So even though the chapter talks about procrastination, all the reasons why I'm so slow, at the end I make peace with it and I say, well, maybe this is just the way I paint. So it's really helped me. My book. It's like somebody else wrote it and it's giving me advice about how to accept my process. Yeah.
00:29:15.930 --> 00:29:39.210
So now you are back to painting and nursing part time. You said earlier about you used to paint in the morning. Is that something you've come back to do? You have a process and you've also said about the slow painting. So I'm just wondering how, you know, it kind of all fits in with work and painting and anything else in life.
00:29:39.608 --> 00:30:13.220
Well, I only work one or two days a week, so that's very helpful. But I do paint in the morning. But another quirky thing I do is that I paint in my dining room. I have a large dining room, living room that's right next to a little tiny galley kitchen. I find, because the painting is right there, I'll still paint a little bit in the afternoon, even in the evening. So it's just very much a part of me. And of course, I have the egg. The egg has to be fresh, so I keep it in the refrigerator and crack a new egg every few days.
00:30:13.380 --> 00:30:18.259
How long does it last then space wise, you know, how much paint can you get out of an egg?
00:30:20.019 --> 00:30:38.900
Well, because the paint is so dilute, you can get a lot of paint. The only time that I used a lot of egg was when I did this four by eight foot painting and I used house paint rollers to do the background and that I was like, wow, I'm going through a lot of eggs. But ordinarily you don't use very much. I just have a little eyedropper.
00:30:39.618 --> 00:30:40.900
Oh, okay.
00:30:41.140 --> 00:30:52.900
Yeah. But still the egg will tend to go bad. Even if I put it in the refrigerator in a maybe two or three days, you can still use it, but the binding is not as good. It's better to have the fresh egg.
00:30:52.980 --> 00:30:57.940
And then how come it's all right on the surface? Is that because it's so dilute?
00:30:58.660 --> 00:31:33.318
Yes. If you use it very thick, it's going to crack. After I do the egg yolk and you get rid of the egg sac, it's a whole process of rolling the yolk around a paper towel and then you hold it and you puncture it and just have the pure egg yolk come out and you throw away the egg sac and then you mix it with about 50, 50 water, usually distilled water, and shake it up. I should have had my egg medium here to show you it's not something like oil paint where you can make these buttery brushstrokes. That's a limitation of tempera.
00:31:33.818 --> 00:31:53.900
Well, there you go. Now I know that's brilliant. I agree with the having it out there because I used. I learned to play clarinet a while ago and I would leave my clarinet out on a stand rather than packing it up. Because then you can just pick it up.
00:31:53.900 --> 00:31:54.420
Yes.
00:31:54.420 --> 00:32:02.220
And start practicing. Otherwise, if you've got to go to another room or you've got to unpack something, you might just go, oh, well, I won't bother.
00:32:02.858 --> 00:32:04.220
Yeah, exactly.
00:32:04.750 --> 00:32:09.150
Yeah. And is that still big work that you're doing in your dining room?
00:32:09.788 --> 00:32:54.118
Yes, I'm working on another four by eight foot painting. It's huge. And after that, the one about immigration, if I ever get to it, it's going to be even bigger. It'll be double wide, like a double wide trailer. It'll be 8 by 16. I'll have to trim it just enough to get it through the patio door. I say in my book that the painting asks me, it's not like, oh, I want to paint big or something. It's nothing like that. When I get an idea for a painting, it tells me how big it wants to be. It's like the unborn painting is talking to me and it says, I need a, you know, 12 by 16. I need a 4 by 8 foot.
00:32:54.598 --> 00:32:55.078
Yeah.
00:32:55.640 --> 00:32:59.000
So it's, it's a really very magical, mystical almost.
00:32:59.670 --> 00:33:02.068
Where do the completed paintings live?
00:33:02.950 --> 00:33:24.788
Well, I still have most of them and what happened was at the beginning, I didn't. Really wasn't good at selling them. Later on people would want to buy them, but some of them were big or I had worked on them so long, I didn't want to sell them for like $200. So right now I'm toying with the idea of putting them up for adoption.
00:33:25.338 --> 00:33:25.818
Oh.
00:33:26.380 --> 00:34:06.788
Instead of selling them. Because what's more important to me is that they take good care of them as an egg tempera painting and also that they have a legacy. In other words, if the person dies and it goes in a dumpster, it wouldn't be too happy. But if, say, they have children or they know how to donate it to a museum, just somebody that would care for the painting and like in an adoption, adoption is expensive. People do pay the agency and different things, so there would be some money involved. But I'm kind of toying with this. Some of the paintings are in private collections, but most of them are still available. So if anyone wants to adopt one, they can get in touch with me.
00:34:09.030 --> 00:34:14.469
Brilliant. Well, that's absolutely perfect because how can people connect with you, Lora?
00:34:14.469 --> 00:34:35.420
Okay, the easiest way is artandlovebook.com because that is easier to remember than Lora Arbrador. I have several domains that are all connected, so you can be arbrador.com, loraarbrador.com or the simplest one is artandlovebook.com and you can sign up for my substack there.
00:34:36.059 --> 00:34:47.059
Perfect. Thank you so much, Lora. I've really enjoyed not only learning your story, but learning about the techniques of this particular painting. So thank you.
00:34:47.460 --> 00:34:50.659
Thank you so much, Claire. It's been really fun talking with you.
00:34:51.780 --> 00:35:24.510
I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, perhaps you'd like to financially contribute to future episodes at buymeacoffee.com/creativityfound. There's a link in the show Notes. If you are listening on a value for value enabled app such as Fountain, TrueFans or Podcast Guru, feel free to send a few sats my way. And if you have no idea of what I'm talking about, you can find out more by listening to my sister podcast called Podcasting 2.0 in Practice,
