The Egg That Wandered Off

There is a version of this story that starts on the water. Years ago I stood on a dock in the Stockholm archipelago and saw it for the first time: an egg the size of a small house, faceted like something a jeweler had scaled up by accident, floating where it had no business floating. The sun did something to it I hadn’t expected. Every flat little plane caught the light differently, so the whole surface seemed to be having its own private conversation with the sky, gold in one spot, pewter in the next, and for a moment I forgot it was a sauna someone could actually sit inside.

I have been thinking about that egg ever since, the way you think about a person you met once at a party and can’t stop wondering about.

So I moved it.

In this painting, it is nowhere near water. It sits in snow, halfway up a mountain, under a sky that looks like it can’t decide whether to storm or clear. There is no dock, no archipelago, no explanation for how it got there. I liked the idea of taking something so tied to one specific place and setting it down somewhere it has absolutely no right to be. Mountains don’t grow eggs. But here we are.

What I wanted to keep, moving it from sea to snow, was that same restlessness of light across its surface. Winter light behaves differently than summer light on water. It’s thinner, colder, more honest somehow. I wanted the egg to still look like it was listening to the sky, even up here, even out of its element.

I think that’s the part of the story that matters most to me. Not the egg itself, but the fact that it still catches light the same way no matter where you put it. Some things carry their own weather with them.

This one is still on the easel. A few more sessions before it’s finished, and I’ll share the final version here when it is.