The Kitchen

What’s the yellow stuff you put in it? Great question, my dear, dear friend. That is egg yolk.

I paint with egg tempera. It sounds weird. People picture a breakfast going badly wrong. But it’s one of the oldest ways humans have of gluing colour to a surface, and it’s the same broad family of technique Leonardo used on the Last Supper. Painters have been cracking eggs over their pigments for centuries while the rest of the world was busy inventing everything else.

Here’s my mix, and I keep it very simple. Half water, half egg yolk. Make sure the water is pure. Mine is fresh spring water from the family farm.

Then the pigment. In pure egg tempera you’d use powdered pigment straight into the egg mixture. I usually don’t, and that’s by design. I use gouache paint instead. Gouache has the same pigment in it, big fat particles of it, and best of all it comes as a paste, already combined with water. So I mix the gouache with the egg mix at about one to one. Because gouache is already a liquid, I don’t want to add too much egg.

The one catch is the gum arabic inside the gouache. So when I’m going straight egg into gouache, I don’t add any more water. Just yolk into paint. A little dollop of gouache, an equal dollop of the egg mix beside it, mix them together, and now you’ve got a buttery paint super similar to oils.

And something strange happens. Whatever colour the yolk had simply fades away. The whites in tempera can come up whiter than the whites in an oil painting. When your binder is a yellow yolk, how is that possible? I don’t know. It just is. Paint is full of these small miracles, like finding a five-dollar note in last winter’s jacket.

You’d think an egg’s an egg. No. I thought so too when I started, but the more aware I got of the way the paint moves, the clearer it became. If the chicken wasn’t healthy and happy, your paint gets this dull effect to it. A healthy, happy chicken, a beautiful fresh egg, and bang: the paint’s alive. No one’s surprised by that, right? Life in, life out.

Egg tempera dries by a different mechanism. It’s an emulsion. As the fats and proteins in the yolk bind together, they seal the pigment into a permanent film, a thin layer on top and inside.

Acrylics and oils actually yellow over time. Acrylics because they’re full of plastics. Oils because linseed oil, or even walnut oil, will just eventually yellow. Something about an egg means it doesn’t. Provided it’s kept in a safe environment, it just stays constant, for hundreds of years.

Tempera wants to be laid down in thin glazes, one after another. No thick impasto moments. Lots of individual strokes, each trying to capture its own little moment in the overall picture, cross-hatched like grass blown flat in a southerly.

That’s also why it’s a bit of a winner if you worry about paint consumption. It has so much pop, and yet you use so little of it. The only thing that could compete for economy, if you ask me, is ink.

Egg tempera is fragile. You’ve seen it. If it’s not looked after, it’s not permanent. But in that fragility there’s a kind of beauty, like a newborn baby: fragile and defenceless, and because of that, you’ll never let any harm come to it.

My daughter paints with it too. She came out to the studio, saw the colours I was using, and said, more or less, “Daddy, I don’t want my washed-out colours. I want your intensity.” So she paints with egg tempera the same way I do. Gouache and egg yolk. She can get it all over her clothes and it washes out. An egg yolk is a thing you eat. Nobody’s writing “please consume this, tastes like strawberries” on an acrylic tube. That should tell you everything.

Let’s talk about the thing nobody in the art shop mentions while they’re ringing up your oils. Fumes.

A lot of the time we say things like: we’ll make amazing art anyway, and hurt ourselves in the process, because one day we’ll be famous and then we can change. Why? Why get to where you want to go and not be the same person when you get there? That’s what solvents will do to you.

You can wear a gas mask, and some people do. But are you going to be methodical with it and wear it every single time? If not, run to the hills. Run to the hills.

So many artists say, “Oh, I use oil paints and I crack a window.” Cool. Okay. The window has been cracked. Everyone relax, the fumes are making an orderly exit out of that one window in the far left-hand corner. You’re totally safe.

No. When you’re outside, that’s the only form of ventilation that counts. Any wall of any kind is not ventilation. Outside, with a slight breeze, ideally blowing away from you, across the work, out into the paddock. That’s why a bit of wind is really good. I peg the canvas down and let the wind carry the fumes off like a sheepdog clearing a gate.

And even acrylic is plastic polymers. Can anyone tell me with a straight face that you should sniff plastic for fifty years and be fine? Doesn’t sound right, does it?

I believe some artists’ trajectories change and we say, oh, their painting evolved. Did it change? Or, over the process of making it, did they melt their frontal lobe? It’s a very tough one to know.

A lot of artists breathe in the fumes and go a little more lightheaded every stroke, and by the end it’s a wild, crazy piece and everyone says, “Oh, it’s amazing,” and the artist falls into this evil trap of having to go back into that environment to get the same magic. Please, please, please look after yourself. If you don’t worry about safety at the start and keep your frontal lobe, there won’t be an artist at all in a few years. I’m hypersensitive to fumes myself. That’s part of why I paint with egg.

Think of it like x-rays. One x-ray, you’ll be absolutely fine. Fifteen a day, every day, for forty years, and you won’t be. If painting’s going to be a bigger part of your life, the materials have to be something you can live with for decades.

I love oils. Oils love it when you add oil over oil and just keep caressing it in. They mix deliciously, like different pigments of butter spreading over warm toast. Great for a huge amount of detail.

The problem with oils is that they’re oils. They rely on linseed oil, which sits there for ages to be reworked. Dry times are what get you. I’ve got paintings out there right now made with homemade oils, which is great, no solvents or driers in them, healthier. But it’s been humid, so I’m going to be waiting for years for them to dry. Literally years. That’s the reality we live in.

Acrylics dry fast, within about twenty-four hours, and that’s their superpower and their tantrum. And here’s the controversial bit: you can get more detail from acrylics than oils, because you can make them transparent and layer them aggressively. Layer, layer, layer. Transparent, transparent, transparent. Oil detail is surface-level detail. Acrylic detail can be depth.

But acrylics have a temper. Put acrylic over acrylic while it’s still wet, wet-on-wet style, and it starts to complain. It goes dull and porridgey and overall yuck. Acrylics want you to go hard and then stop. Go hard, then stop. As soon as you notice you’re going back over areas that already have paint, no matter how much you’re in the mood, the painting is no longer in the mood for you. That’s why you keep several canvases on the go. Take one down, put another up. Outside, you only need about two hours before it’s touch-dry enough to paint over.

A lot of people will tell you: don’t mix oils and acrylics. That’s bad. There are rules, they’ll say, fat over lean and so on. Great rules. Cool.

Here’s my naughty bit. I mix oils and acrylics frequently. You’re totally fine to paint them side by side. Put one on top of the other and one dries faster than the other, and that does cause cracking. Do the wrong thing and it might never dry at all. So be careful. And never put oils down too thick under acrylics, or you’ll be waiting years.

But if you don’t mind cracking, there’s beauty in it. The paint contracts and you see the colour underneath through the cracks, like dry riverbed opening on a different colour of earth. It’s not curdling or ruining itself. Once it’s cracked, it’s stable. If you like a bit of wilderness, those rules are suggestions.

A painting is a lot like a cake. It doesn’t take much to ruin one. Salt instead of sugar and a success becomes a catastrophe. The wrong medium makes paint split, run or never dry. Know your ingredients.