It is not surprising that in a world of fast food, trending topics and Snapchat, a growing number of people yearn for an unhurried pace, one that allows them to smell the roses along life’s superhighway. In response, various slow movements that promise to decelerate our lives have recently picked up speed.
When it comes to slow art, painter Anna Ross-Cook is a movement unto herself. In recent years the artist has found her medium in that slowest of techniques, egg tempera painting.
Egg tempera is composed of artist-quality pigments, egg yolk and water. Ross-Cook has been known to prepare the paint herself, blending the raw pigments and eggy binder to the right consistency. She augments these with manufactured tempera colors that come in small metal tubes.
Working with tempera involves layering the translucent paint onto a smooth support (Ross-Cook uses illustration board or gesso-coated panels) until the desired saturation of color is obtained.
“Everything has to be very thin layers,” says Ross-Cook. “I can apply it with a palette knife, but it has to be thin – very, very thin. I can get a toothbrush, and as long as my mixture’s right, I can take colors and do fly-specking over the whole background. But it all has to be very thin.”
The walls of Ross-Cook’s home are decorated with her art. Here is a portrait of her infant son (since grown up), sleeping in his crib; over there a great blue heron stands sentinel on a pine branch. Near it, deep red berries glisten within the wrinkled pod that holds them. And visible from her studio room is the painting for which she won an Environmental Learning Center Choice Award last December at Gallery 14’s “Beautiful Waters” show. It depicts two couples strolling the oceanfront walkway at Humiston Park.
Tempera painting (with binders of egg, honey, casein or glue) goes back to the ancient Egyptians, who used it to decorate sarcophagi. Tempera has been found in the cave-temple murals of India, in medieval manuscripts, and in early Renaissance altarpieces. In the 15th century, when oil succeeded tempera as the painting medium of choice, the art of tempera painting was largely forgotten. More than four centuries later, 20th century artists like Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald Marsh, Jacob Lawrence and Andrew Wyeth revived its use in their own work.
Ross-Cook admits that tempera painting is not for everyone. For her, however, its pluses far outweigh its minuses.
Like acrylic paint, tempera dries quickly to the touch; like watercolor, it has a radiant translucence. Similar to oil paint, tempera takes about a year to fully cure. Once cured, a tempera painting’s surface is hard and tough, and can be displayed like an oil painting, without the added expense of matting and glass. Ross-Cook avers that it is the ideal medium.
“I don’t know why more people don’t do it,” she says, adding, “It is kind of a nerdy pursuit.”
Her drafting table currently holds a work in progress. It is a painting on a small panel – about 8-by-10 inches – that depicts a clutch of eggs nestled on a piece of satin. “I sit there, and I’m just fascinated by the painting as it develops. It’s more like the journey, rather than the goal kind of thing,” Ross-Cook says.
Tempera is a rational art medium; every creative action is preceded by planning. The act of painting itself – one small, consistent stroke at a time – is a contemplative experience.
“I can’t see getting all emotional and having fabulous brushstrokes, and getting it done and pouring passion into it. It’s not like that.”
Ross-Cook was born and raised in Ontario, Canada, in the city of Mississauga, about 20 miles south of Toronto. She attended a high school for the arts in her hometown and afterward applied unsuccessfully to the Ontario College of Art. She instead entered the University of Toronto, where she received a B.A. in English. Afterward, her reapplication to the Ontario College of Art was accepted, but she left the program before being awarded a degree.
Ross-Cook, along with her husband at the time and their 8-year-old son, moved to Florida in 1991. They lived first in Palm Bay and then in Sebastian before settling in Vero Beach, which has been the artist’s home for the past 17 years.
In 1995 she began to work for Faux Effects International, a company that puts murals, decorative stenciling and faux finishes on the walls and furniture of clients’ homes and businesses. Ross-Cook’s job was to draw and paint images that would be photographically enlarged and transferred to the surfaces they would enhance. She later designed stencils, and learned how to operate the machine that cuts them. Finally, she taught faux-finishing techniques in the company’s school.
After 10 years Ross-Cook had a good grounding in the commercial aspect of art. She then left the company to explore art’s creative side. To make ends meet, she worked for a time at a local framing shop and, at present, is the manager of Crafts and Stuff.
It was on a visit to her mother’s house in 2005 that Ross-Cook’s eye fell on a stack of Time magazines from the 1960s. She was struck by the portrait paintings on the magazine’s covers that depicted, in mesmerizing detail, such weighty figures as Cardinal Cushing, Walter Cronkite and Dr. Christiaan Barnard. Ross-Cook later learned that the artist behind the portraits was Robert Vickrey, a fine artist as well as illustrator who died in 2011. His medium, Ross-Cook learned, was egg tempera, well suited to the magic realist style of his paintings.
Ross-Cook bought his book on tempera techniques. She also researched the work of other modern tempera painters before jumping into it herself.
“So I’m kind of self-taught,” she says. “The more I got into tempera, the more in love with it I fell. Now I’m coming across other artists who are doing abstracts with it. They paint large blocks of color, which on closer examination seem to glow from within. It takes layers upon layers of color to get that jewel-like quality.”
One of Ross-Cook’s recent gems was seen in May at the Artists Guild Gallery’s annual competitive show. Executed on a 5-by-7-inch copper-leafed panel, “Power Plant” is a striking portrait of the electric power station known locally as “Big Blue.”
Limned in turquoise green, silver and gray against an ultramarine sky, the miniaturized plant has the appearance of a princely stronghold in a medieval prayer book. The colors of the plant, says Ross-Cook, are what inspired her to paint it.
“I like the power plant on a bright, clear day, but even when there’s a storm coming up behind it, it sits there like a little jewel on the landscape,” she says. “I could stand there, just looking at it.”