These two paintings recently sold. I wanted to post them here since I won't be showing them back home.
"The Village in The Sky" acrylic on canvas (left)
"Malawi Mama Returning Home" egg tempera (right)

A while back I did an egg tempera paint making demonstration with the Youth AIDS Resource Center in Ekwendeni (a small town just north of Mzuzu). The center is run by the CCAP (Central Church of Africa Presbyterian) and has some 26 youth clubs around the area. One of their clubs is the handmade paper making club. Using recycled materials (office papers, newspaper, etc) they make their own paper and cards for sale. The proceeds goes towards paying school fees for orphans and providing food for the HIV/AIDS home-based care program out in the villages. Before I did my demonstration they were decorating cards with collages (leafs, feathers, dried flowers, etc), but expressed interest in painting. It was a perfect opportunity to share the results of my experimentation with natural pigments. This group doesn’t have it in their budget to be buying paint but they can easily dig up colorful soils in their “backyard”, make charcoal and collect white chalk from schools.

Last weekend, I turned our kitchen into a chemistry lab. The Quest...to successfully make long lasting paint using only my hands and natural resources. The Result…fabulous egg tempera paint!

Egg Tempera ExperimentI was inspired by a number of factors including Victoria Finlay’s book Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Malawian artists’ need of access to affordable paint, and personal curiosity. Over the past few months I have been researching pigments and paint making techniques. Egg tempera paint is one of the oldest paints known to man, even older than oil painting. Some date egg tempera paint back to the first centuries AD, but it was most widely used in the Middle Ages with the Byzantine painters. The Greek Orthodox Church has maintained the tradition, and up to the present still uses egg tempera for icon paintings. In the secular world of art this tradition has seen a revival over the past 10 years. So much so, that there is a great online forum where you can read and participate in discussions about issues relating to egg tempera paint and painting