Roving egg is art major’s latest project

By Mark Muckenfuss

Have you seen the egg?

If you have, you know. If you haven’t, well, you’re missing out. 

Hiernonymus, a sky-blue, human-sized egg – which would require a two-story-high chicken to produce it naturally – has shown up at the Cal State Monterey Bay Starbucks, a campus bus bench and it may show up soon in the Otter Student Union. “He” has legs with striped blue tights and tennies, and flowers bursting from the top of his dome. He’s the creation of Pete Howley, a visual and public art major. 

Howley is … egg-ceptional. 

Howley is a junior transfer, but he’s also a senior. At 62, he’s not your typical Otter. He spent years in the computer industry, working for IBM, before deciding he’d had enough and set out to pursue his true passion of art. 

He’d already one such attempt early in life. With a father who was a painter and sculptor, Howley intended to follow a similar path. But his eldest brother convinced him he’d be better off making money in the tech world. So he studied computer science at UCLA and UC Santa Cruz. 

“I had one class left to finish my computer science degree at UCSC, and I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to do this,’” he recalled. “So, I left, and I went to the San Francisco Art Institute.” 

But family life got in the way and he didn’t finish that program either. Instead, he dropped out and dropped into Silicon Valley. It was only several decades, three kids and a new direction in life later that his drive to be an artist was re-ignited. By then, he was living in Watsonville. 

“I saw CSUMB had a visual and public arts major,” he said. “The whole idea of public art, that’s exactly what I wanted to do.”

Enter, Hieronymus the egg. 

“I am the egg man … coo-coo cachoo!” Howley chuckled, echoing an old Beatles song.”The idea came to me to make a life-size Hieronymus Bosch-inspired egg person. Once I thought of it, I had to do it.”

You might say he was … egg-cited.

Bosch, a Dutch painter from the turn of the 16th century, is sometimes referred to as a proto-surrealist for his fantastical, religious-inspired paintings. His depictions of the Garden of Earthly Delights and hell are among his most notable works. There are wild images of figures with animal heads and monstrous creatures consuming people. In one painting, there is even a blue egg with legs. 

And Howley said, “In his paintings, there are flowers coming out of weird places, even out of people’s butts. So, that’s where the flowers came from.”

Creating the egg was hard work. It’s made of concentric rings of three-quarter-inch plywood, glued, screwed and sanded before the paint was applied. The resulting piece weighs about 70 pounds. Howley hauls it around on a cart. And, when he isn’t sneaking it into Starbucks at 7:30 in the morning before students are around, he and his egg get plenty of interest. During a short interview in front of the coffee shop, where Hieronymus was perched on the cart next to him, several students stopped to interact with the egg and take selfies. 

“I’d heard rumors of it,” said third-year psychology student Dylan Wheeler. “It piqued my curiosity and made me chuckle.”

A perfect reaction as far as Howley is concerned. 

“It’s designed to create delight,” he said. “It was designed also as a muse, a fairy if you will, a creative force.”

“You can sit next to it,” he added, “take a picture, give it a hug.”

Its next stop is uncertain, but Howley said he isn’t above creating a shell game.

“I guess I’ll have to play Find the Easter Egg,” he said, “although it has nothing to do with Easter, nothing at all.” 

He’s still searching for the perfect venue.

“My goal is to have as many people as possible see it,” Howley said. “If I could, I’d just leave it outside somewhere for people to enjoy. The reaction has been really gratifying.”

Which, it’s pretty clear, makes him … egg-static.