Someday, Pat Clement of Auburn would like to be an abstract artist. For now, she is revisiting an old passion that started almost as an accident.

Somehow, she brings elaborate images and poignant passages to life on the fragile and delicate surfaces of eggs.

Clement patiently cradles an egg and applies tiny and purposeful brush strokes. After many hours of dedication, she produces a scene that captures someone’s memory or illustrates an event. She creates a design that animates a mood or marries her ideals of color and pattern. With a special pen, she even scribes poetry and entire Bible passages in precise and flowing penmanship.

Turning 75 tomorrow, Clement discovered eggs as an art medium in 1989. She received a set of paints for Christmas and couldn’t wait to use it. The problem was that she had a house full of family and guests, and she thought pulling out a canvas and easel would seem rude.

“I didn’t want my guests to think that I wasn’t paying attention to them,” said Clement. She recalls pulling an egg out of the refrigerator and starting to doodle on it while still fully engaging in conversations around her.

A few church fairs later and she was soon being commissioned and sought after for her unique art.

Clement keeps a registry of her creations. They have all meant something to her, mostly because the people who have her eggs have meant something to her. Even if she didn’t know them, the sharing of their life stories became part of her as she recreated them.

“It’s been a real treat collaborating with people, getting to know them, finding out what they hold dear,” said Clement.

She remembers one couple who wanted to commemorate their wedding anniversary with a scene of them parked in a car by the lake where they fell in love. The owners of the Fairmont Copley Plaza commissioned Clement to recreate their building facade. Opened in 1912, the luxury hotel in the middle of Boston dominates Copley Square with its massive gold lions on either side of the entrance.

“That was a challenge,” recalled Clement.

One of her favorite egg creations went to her favorite columnist. Clement had researched the scriptures used at a traditional Seder. She copied all of the passages and illustrated them on a small egg. Art Buchwald bought that egg.

And there are the many personal requests from friends and family. Each with a different purpose, a different story, a different relationship. Clement makes them all a part of who she is. She respectfully and humbly carries out her charge on that amazing miracle of nature — the egg.

Without training, with a little trial and error and with some ingenuity from her craftsman husband, Bernard, Clement found the tools and resources for her egg art. Her husband devised an apparatus out of a five-gallon bucket and an old Electrolux vacuum cleaner that sucked the yolk out of eggs and into the bucket. He also found a way to attach a small, decorated metal shaft through an egg so she could create an egg inside an egg.

“When I started, Bernard was immediately enthusiastic and helpful,” said Clement. “I couldn’t have done half of what I wanted without him.”

Together, they found emu eggs, rhea eggs and ostrich eggs. Clement prefers goose eggs because of their not-too-small, not-too-large size. She especially prefers duck eggs because of their silky shell texture which seems to hold color the best.
A dental drill found through the Yellow Pages allowed Clement to carve out exquisite designs in the shell. Her own dentist helped her order magnifiers to attach to her glasses so she could create finely detailed designs.

After Clement retired from teaching high school English in 1995, she slowed down. She had other obligations, and her art did not seem a priority. Actually, art has always been a passion for Clement, but it also seemed a luxury that she sometimes couldn’t justify.

She matter-of-factly explained that she wasn’t allowed to take an art class in high school and that art seemed like a frivolous reason for college. “Art was what you did on Sunday afternoons when you didn’t have anything better to do,” she said.

While art may have seemed superfluous, proper penmanship was not. Adults in her community hired a Palmer Method teacher to make sure that the children could write beautifully. And Clement could. In these days of instant messaging and texting, script seems like a lost art.

Clement does not try to market her eggs any longer. She doesn’t really have time to take many requests, because she is the primary caregiver for her husband’s health needs. But she does still enjoy her egg art just because she loves to create beauty, solve puzzles and share a story.

Shelling out more of the facts …

How large is your home collection?

I probably have about 40 finished eggs still. Some of them are my earliest. I’m keeping them just because I’m sentimental. As a woman, your work never stays done. But with the eggs, it’s such a lovely surprise to think that I did something that stayed done, and it’s still nice to look at.

How many eggs have you painted?

My most productive years were near the beginning. By 1990, I had them in several shops in Boston. In 1991, when I did the Copley Hotel egg, I had painted 117 eggs. After I retired from teaching, caregiving became an almost immediate circumstance and I didn’t do as many. Not counting the church fairs, I’ve probably painted about 600 eggs.

What is your personal favorite?

Probably the first ones that I painted the inside scenes. No one had seen anyone do that before. In 1992, I painted one with different seasons on the outside and inside for a dear friend in appreciation of her help with my daughter’s wedding. I didn’t know what I was doing, but it worked. And it was a special time and a special friend.

Where do you get your eggs?

At first, I ordered them from a place in Michigan. The exotic ones we got when we were in Florida. There was a lady in Minot that I used to get eggs from, but then we found a lady in North Hampton, N.H., who could supply hundreds of eggs. I probably still have about 400 unpainted eggs. If I live to be 100, I guess I’ll still be painting eggs.

How do you prepare the eggs for artwork?

My husband is really the engineer behind the scenes. He devised the vacuum that cleaned the yolk out of the eggs. We would set an egg on a spigot that he had fastened on a five-gallon bucket. There was another opening attached to the hose of a vacuum cleaner, and when we turned it on, the pressure just pulled the yolk right out of the egg and into the bucket. When we first tried it, we had just a gallon bucket. We were so excited being able to do so many eggs at a time that we forgot to look down. We had yolk overflowing all over the floor.
Bernard also came up with a way to attach a small and decorated metal shaft through an egg so that I could create an egg inside an egg. Whatever it was that I had an idea for, he would somehow find a way to make it happen.

What is the longest you worked on an egg?

I guess my eggs have ranged from 3 to 40 hours. It really depends on the design and size of an egg. The longest one was probably a cluster of grapes. I had to draw, then ink in the outlines. Then I used a dental drill to carve out any shell that wasn’t part of the grapes. Then I painted it. I always carved before I painted because if I was going to break one, I didn’t want to waste painting time.

What was the most complicated egg you created?

A lady had commissioned an anniversary egg for her friends. She wanted the egg to reflect the couple as a whole and as individuals. So the outside egg showed his interest in sailing, hers in music. The inside egg rotated so that on one half you could see all of the family data – birthdays, anniversaries, and such. The other half showed their shared love for gardening.

How do you keep from breaking the eggs?

(Laugh). Well, if you’re going to work with eggs, you can’t be too uptight. I managed to get fairly comfortable with them. I usually worked in a carpeted room. One time, I was painting a scene inside an egg and there was a speck of dust in there. When I blew it out, the egg went shooting out of my hands. Oh well. Another time, I dropped an egg from the kitchen counter to the floor, and it didn’t break.
The interesting thing is that I never worry about children handling the eggs. They somehow know to hold them in their whole hands. And because they’re young, they have a lot of moisture in their skin. Older people seem to have the hardest time. Their skin is dry so the egg tends to slip out, and they try to be so careful that they lose their grip.

How do you produce the images?

Sometimes I sketch them on paper first. Sometimes I sketch them on the egg. Unless someone gives me a specific design or picture, I always just create the images from my head. I love using water colors, and I mix them with a little acrylic to stabilize the color. When the egg is all finished, I coat it with a polyurethane.

Where do you get your ideas?

I’ll go through long periods when I just cannot do it. Then one day, the energy will come back to the surface. Usually from hearing other people’s stories. I love the challenge of telling other people’s stories. And I’m always inspired with anything to do with my faith. I’ve done the entire Easter (Holy) Week on an egg, passages and chapters from the Bible. Scores of music. Anything to do with the church is always very easy for me.

“If you’re going to work with eggs, you can’t be too uptight,” says Pat Clement of Auburn, who has painted hundreds of eggs.

Pat Clement sometimes covers an eggshell with beautifully scripted Bible passages.

Pat Clement painted Biblical scenes on this egg.