How do you like your Eggs?

A spoon waits in one hand while the other rests flat on the table, fingers spread, and between them sits a single boiled egg in its cup on a pale saucer. The person's face is cropped away entirely, leaving only a grey shirt and two hands, which turns a very ordinary breakfast into something a bit more suspenseful. The title asks a question the painting refuses to answer. Soft-boiled? Hard? We only get the moment just before the shell is cracked.

Ella Williams works in a loose, contemporary figurative style where the paint is never hidden. The red checked cloth is built from overlapping bands of orange, pink and grey that don't quite line up, so the pattern seems to shimmer and slide rather than lie flat, and the plate is a few smeared strokes of blue and white that somehow read perfectly as porcelain. Notice the hands: the skin is streaked with pink, yellow and green, colours you would never call realistic, yet they hold weight and warmth. Painters have been staging small domestic dramas around tables for centuries, and this one belongs to that lineage, just with brighter cloth and a wittier question.