I fell in love with egg tempera after seeing Andrew Wyeth's iconic painting 'Christina's World' in New York's Museum of Modern Art back in the 1970s. I was flying Boeing 707s and, later, 747s for Aer Lingus and I was able to visit the great museums, bookshops, and art materials stores. I also met several of the people in Wyeth's paintings and had the opportunity to study with some world-class painters in Italy, Norway and the US.
Egg tempera is paint made from beautiful powdered pigments, mixed (that is, tempered) with egg yolk and a little distilled water. This was the medium commonly used up to the 15th century Renaissance, when oil became more popular. Although I paint in both mediums I am one of the few painters in Ireland that works in traditional egg tempera. It's like weaving the earth stroke by tiny stroke and it dries very quickly, whereas oils are more easily blended. I often paint people in landscape that are lost in their own private thoughts, as in this small tempera 'Daydream'. This imagined scene, set in the woodland at Glendalough in County Wicklow, shows my wife Sarah in a reverie, accompanied by night owls. This combination of realism and an imagined event is sometimes called Magic Realism.
One of my temperas titled 'Flypast' (below) showing the Green Comet over Achill Island will be included in NASA's forthcoming Lunar Codex digital capsule and placed on the moon along with my oil Self-Portrait with Hat. I expect it will be viewed by the Man in the Moon.
