A painter turned registered nurse, and back to art again, Arbrador’s work spans the life cycle from birth to death.  Although “Surgical surrealism” is one classification given to the paintings, arenas of bodily function- lactation, menstruation and a gentle eroticism go beyond the medical idiom.

Medium of the Byzantine icon painter, Egg Tempera, egg yolk mixed with pure pigment, dictates a premeditated process, which Arbrador both embraces and resists. There is a potential for sacrilege in creating works about the body in such a sacred milieu, but Arbrador suffuses a feeling of sanctity into the paintings.

Arbrador has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S.A., including South Bend Regional Museum of Art (Indiana), Woman Made Gallery (Chicago), Wenatchee Valley College Art Gallery (Washington), and the Bade Museum of the Pacific School of Religion (California). Arbrador won first place at the Anatriptic Arts Festival in 1992 (California) and at the Art and Healing exhibit at Artwest Gallery in 1997 (Wyoming).

In 1995 she created the lecture, Botticelli's Forgotten Medium; Egg Tempera Past and Present, for presentation at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. In 1998 Arbrador co-founded the Society of Tempera Painters, inspired by the original Society of Painters in Tempera (founded in 1901 in England).