For purchase contact artist, thejamesnazz@gmail.com

15” x 15” x 15” 28cm x 28cm x 28cm

Contact artist for sales.

This piece was the first that I used egg shells to create, and it happened quite by accident. At the time I was painting in egg tempera, which required me to make my palette every morning by separating the yoke and mixing it with powdered pigments to make my paints. I would stack the shells on the edge of the kitchen sink until I got a stack of about six inches, and then started two new stacks. I ended up with what you see now - yet I didn’t see it at first, it was only later in the day that I glanced at it and saw it for what it had become. That was the “Genesis” for my exploration into eggs, other ideas just kept rolling out and hasn’t stopped. Eggs represent a life form, neither gender or species specific. This versatility, fragility of the shell, and beauty of it’s texture and color allows me to combine the eggs with other objects and situations creating representation of some very human feelings. The egg is an object that almost everyone on Earth is familiar with, and knows what it is from a very early age. After all, everyone knows what happens when you drop an egg.

Melted egg traditional Ukrainian spring dish.

This was the 2nd or 3rd piece I did, and put aside because I was unsure of how I wanted to finish it. After a couple of years I noticed the gathering layer of dust and decided that acquiring a patina of dust was the finishing touch. It was carefully moved with me from studio to studio for the next 30 years. The challenge was fixing the dust so it wouldn’t fall off, a sneeze could ruin the piece. I experimented with dust retrieved from household spots, developing techniques to permanently adhere the dust, one of which involved heat vaporizing urethane to gently coat the dust. The urethane worked but also gave everything a yellowish tint. What I needed to do was similar to a pastel drawing sprayed with fixative, but spraying it with fixative directly would just blow off the dust. I took a long rectangular cardboard box, cut open the back end and placed it near a widow fan, at the top of the front end cut an opening, and inside the box inserted a couple of panels for the air to flow around. I placed the art in the back end of the box and sprayed pastel fixative in the front top opening, the baffling of the box prevented the spray from directly hitting the art but the draft from the fan pulled the fine mist onto the sculpture, securing the dust.

I showed this piece in Veselka Restaurant and got interesting feedback from the staff, most children immediately know what it is but most adults didn’t get it.

She was pretty, radiant, sparkling, blonde, slim, sexy, with porcelain skin and stunning blue green eyes. She was shy, superstitious, delicate, insecure, needy, stubborn, cunning, manipulative, aggressive, desperate, and vicious.

One of my earliest memories was lying in the grass while Brian’s mom hung white sheets on the clothesline. Against the blue sky with white puffy clouds the sheets looked like sails of a pirate ship

This egg was mailed from my house in New Jersey to my apartment in New York. I have since individually mailed about three dozen eggs, some as far as California; ninety five percent make it.

My brother, Scott, took up drawing late in life. He did this drawing of a wedge of wood which was rough cut and a little weathered. He brought the drawing over with the wood and we discussed the drawing and his techniques with the pencil. When we were finished he was about to throw the wedge into the fireplace, but I saved it because I found it interesting. It sat on my mantle for about a year until I came up with the idea for this piece - one wedge of wood inspired two totally different interpretations.

Canned eggs never took off in North America but in other parts of the world are quite popular. Since the eggs are pasteurized they may be eaten raw from the can, and many people eat them raw like an oyster. The can placed in boiling water will poach the egg or with the lid removed and placed over a flame to make a fried egg.

My father passed away 23 years before my mother. Her demise was pause for reflecting on their lives and grandparents and ancestors that came before them. I always felt that I was a self-made man, but the courses of their lives had laid the foundation for what my life could become. With my mother’s death came the realization that I am next in the queue.

It is extraordinarily difficult to find a love relationship that fits; a simple endeavor but one of the most technically challenging to execute.

In order for this piece to work, the eggs had to be exactly the same size and shape. Even with my vast experience with eggs, it wasn’t until creating this piece, that I realized how subtly different they are, like fingerprints: no two are exactly alike. Tom Birchard, owner of Veselka Restaurant, located in the East Village in New York City, let me go through hundreds of eggs to find two dozen the same size and shape. The challenge was figuring out how to cut both in exactly the same place so they would precisely fit together. This was accomplished by submerging one of the eggs in plaster at the angle and depth needed for the cut, after the plaster hardened placing the others in the plaster mold allowed to be drawn a pencil line along the edge where egg and plaster meet making a cut line exactly the same on all. Apparently, in both love and art there are simultaneous challenges of fit, finish and compatibility.