Personal Art History
My experiments with pysanky began when I was in 7th grade. My middle school library had a book on egg decoration, which I checked out in December, to the librarian’s amazement. (My mother never blinked.)
My twin sisters and I decorated eggs at the kitchen table. We used McCormick’s Food Coloring, which had a wonderful color chart on back telling how to mix about twelve different colors. We had a Dixie cup for each one. The book also suggested hollowing out the eggs before dying them, and I can remember doing this with (unbelievably) a straight pin. The book featured several different ways to decorate eggs, and the pysanka chapter (written for impatient young adults) wasn’t very long at all. It showed how to use a straight pen stuck in the eraser of a pencil to make small wax daubs on an eggshell. The book showed a simple cross pattern; one I duplicated faithfully many times over the next few years. Sadly, the pin-in-an-eraser method was very primitive. I just couldn’t get enough wax on the egg to do much experimentation.
The book did talk about kristkas, which are used to actually write on an egg with wax, instead of daubing it on as I did. The book suggested using an old fountain pen as a kristka. I haunted garage sales, and eventually found Old Faithful, my first real egg tool. This blue fountain pen was a favorite through high school and into college. It was responsible for several beautiful eggs, several of which I still treasure today. It still didn’t hold much wax, but it was a great improvement over the pin-in-an-eraser.
In college one of my roommates gave me a huge plastic bag with several containers of Rit dye. I can’t remember why any more, but the dye changed my egging. I experimented with various ratios of water, dye and vinegar until I found a formula that seemed to work – 1 teaspoon dye and ½ teaspoon vinegar in 1 ½ cups hot water. The formula wasn’t always foolproof, and sometimes I got really strange results, which just added to the fun.
After college graduation and a few miserable semesters in grad school I went to my local community college for re-training as a network specialist. This became a major turning point in my life and in my art for several reasons. I discovered the Internet, and found an egger’s e-mail discussion group which put me in touch with people across the globe who shared my hobby. I picked up lots of tips, and (thanks to the web) lots of inspiration. I even found out about a local egg show, where I purchased some of my first non-chicken eggs.
As part of my network curricula I took a technical writing course. During the course students had to prepare a group presentation, and my group chose to do theirs on pysanka. I was determined to have a better kristka to share with the class. My father owns a metal fabrication shop, and after a few conferences he constructed the Big Daddy kristka for me, a huge metal funnel with an overly large hold which pours out wax at an alarming rate. It’s still one of my favorites, and one day I’m going to get him to refine it. In the same week I broke down and mail-ordered a pysanka kit, complete with a Derlin kristka and official pysanka dyes. I felt ready to make “real” pysanky.
It didn’t take long for me to discover that I was terrible at traditional pysanky. I couldn’t draw a straight line, and couldn’t afford an egg marker. I grew frustrated, and it took me a while to come to terms with my art, and accept that I would never have classically beautiful eggs. I really wanted to make traditional designs! It took me a while to see my own non-traditional eggs as a valid art form. I felt that since no one else was working as I did that I must be doing something wrong. It took me a long time to realize that unique is a good thing, and that my artistic goals needed to be about stretching myself; not emulating someone else.
Today I just have fun with the art. I concentrate on color and texture more than anything else, and experiment with non-traiditional tools and materials on a regular basis. It's made egging much more fun, and much less stressful.
