He’s a bartender at Starboard Side Bar, a golf enthusiast, and… a master Easter egg painter.Mr. Uke, known to the government as John Muzychka, doesn’t give one an impression of a guywho has been creating Easter egg masterpieces for nearly 40 years. Yet it is true, and for nearlyas long as he has been making these eggs they have continued to elicit the same response.

“Wow.”

Muzychka doesn’t come from a heavily artistic background. He says Lida, his sister, was alwaysthe artist in the family. But as Muzychka says, “You can’t golf in the wintertime,” and he needed something to do to help occupy his time. She suggested that he look into painting Easter eggs and bought him a starter kit at a Ukrainian supply store. The rest is history.

The only machine that Muzychka uses is a lathe, which he uses to draw horizontal lines around the eggs with great accuracy. More than any kind of innate artistic ability, Muzychka’s steady hands and uncanny ability to spot a straight line are what helped him create these incredible eggs. When he worked in construction, “They didn’t even need a level, they’d just call me over and I would go, ‘Yup, plum.’”

After penciling these rings around the egg he eyeballs the egg and divides it into four quarters horizontally. These even sections will help guide Muzychka as he sketches the pattern. From there it is a fairly straightforward (though painstaking) process that requires intense focus and concentration. The egg is dipped in paint, and then hot wax is applied anywhere Muzychka wants the color to stay. This process is repeated for every color, keeping in mind that if the wax is disturbed, the egg is ruined. And did I mention, some of the lines on the finished egg are thinner than a credit card?

After repeating this process, Muzychka carefully melts off the wax using a candle. The egg is finished by punching a hole through the bottom, removing the yolk, and coating the egg in varnish to protect it. The finished products are truly phenomenal– after the varnish, the eggs gleam in the light, looking more like a jewel than something that once fell out of a chicken. Close inspection reveals how the pattern is repeated on each section of the egg with astounding accuracy. Everything is even, no matter how small the dot or slight the line.

Easter eggs of this caliber can fetch a decent price if Muzychka were interested. Some would likely go for around $75, but he’s  most interested in other people’s reactions to his work. He loves it when people look at his eggs and say “Wow, did you do this?” He once had an egg that matched his sister’s doctor’s paisley tie and gave it to him as a gift. The doctor could hardly believe that he made the egg, and when Muzychka returned, the doctor let him know that the egg was now on prominent display in his office. His friends admire the eggs, and when they ask for one he puts them on a list. Every year he chooses a few people from the list, and they are blessed with one of his masterpieces.

Painting the eggs has become a morning ritual for Muzychka. He wakes up, puts on some coffee, takes a shower, and begins painting eggs. The morning of the interview he woke up at 6AM and spent three and a half hours painting eggs before going to work.

Mr. Uke hasn’t changed his process too much since he started. He upgraded from a cup filled with wax,  applied with a hot wire, to a pen-like tool with interchangeable tips he can feed wax into. He is constantly looking for new patterns to experiment with, and Muzychka is still hungry to improve his craft.

As he says, “I’m looking for the perfect egg.”