FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 2026
Art & Love: Lora Arbrador’s Memoir and Art Book Exploring American Counterculture and Painting from the 1960s to Now
Marks Its One Year Anniversary
San Francisco, CA – Artist Lora Arbrador marks the one year anniversary of her memoir and art book Art & Love: My Life Illuminated in Egg Tempera, which first released in October, 2025, by Sycamore Press.
Art & Love is an intimate, unflinching memoir of an artist’s life shaped by her devotion to the rare art form of egg tempera painting alongside a deeply personal journey of romantic intrigue and intimacy set against the sweeping backdrop of countercultural America starting in the 1960s. This backdrop presents moments throughout the artist’s life as she moves through communal living that ranges from the benign to the cult-like, forays into San Francisco’s sex underground, and her later work as a nurse during the AIDS epidemic, which became a defining force in the book, inspiring frank visual and narrative depictions of death and bodily experience.
Since it first released, Arbrador’s memoir has received a number of reviews, including Kirkus Reviews, which describes the memoir as a “beautifully designed and engrossing homage to the life-changing power of art.” It has been the recipient of several awards, including the Bronze medal winner in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
Arbrador continues to garner press and recognition for the book as well as speaking engagements and artist workshops, including an upcoming event at Albany Public Library.
In her art practice, Arbrador draws from her experiences living in countercultural spaces during the 1960s, her background as a registered nurse, and the traditions of egg tempera to create paintings that confront aspects of bodily experience often absent from contemporary art discourse and visual culture.
Book Details
Art & Love is available to order at any independent bookstore, Bookshop.org or Amazon. It’s available as an ebook, paperback, deluxe coffee-table hardcover, and audiobook on Spotify, Audible or Amazon.
Publication date: October 15, 2025
Deluxe Hardcover (Coffee Table Edition)
ISBN: 979-8-9909469-0-3
9.5″ × 11″, 263 pages, full color, bookmark ribbon, quarterbound in linen
Paperback
ISBN: 979-8-9909469-1-0
7.5″ × 9″, 268 pages, full-color
E-Book (EPUB)
ISBN: 979-8-9909469-2-7
Audiobook
ISBN: 979-8-9909469-3-4
Narrated by the author
About Lora Arbrador
At the age of 19, Lora Arbrador was given a recipe for making egg tempera paint, a luminous but challenging medium practiced from antiquity to the present. Like a musician drawn to a particular instrument, Arbrador found her creative home in egg tempera.
To support her art practice, Arbrador became a registered nurse, and the medical world has inspired many of her paintings, which explore themes of mortality, sensuality, and the celebration of bodily functions. Her painting Don’t Go My Friend: The Death of John Walsh won first place at the Art and Healing exhibition at ArtWest Gallery. Her memoir/art book, Art & Love: My Life Illuminated in Egg Tempera (Sycamore Press, 2025), was a Bronze medal winner in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Art & Love is held in the National Art Library of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Getty Research Institute Library, Los Angeles, CA.
Captivated by the history of egg tempera, Arbrador was invited to speak at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in 1995. Her presentation, Botticelli’s Forgotten Medium: Egg Tempera Past and Present, has since been shared with a wide range of audiences.
Arbrador has exhibited her paintings in galleries and museums throughout the United States, including the South Bend Regional Museum of Art, Wenatchee Valley College Art Gallery, and the Bade Museum of the Pacific School of Religion.
In 1997, she co-founded the Society of Tempera Painters, modeled after the 1901 Society of Painters in Tempera in England. Her first book, A History of Roman Calligraphy, is housed in the Stern Book Arts & Special Collections Center at the San Francisco Public Library.
When not painting or working as a registered nurse, Arbrador plays the banjo and learns songs from the Great American Songbook. Her studio is in San Francisco, California, USA.