Essays
The
Wild and Wonderful Work of Matt Lamb
by Virginia Miller, October 1999
Appeared in Catalogue: "Matt Lamb,
Another World"
At the entrance to Matt Lamb's first exhibition in ArtSpace/Virginia
Miller Galleries, I posted a sign: "This is not tame
art. This is wild, crazy, wonderful work that
engages the emotions and challenges the intellect of the
viewer." The gallery telephone message added yet
another cautionary message: "If you're not careful,
these fantastic creatures, colors and forms will hold
you in their spell forever!"
Like music or poetry, Lamb's paintings defy translation;
their interpretation lies within the mind of the viewer.
His imaginary creatures, complex surfaces, and luscious
colors create synergistic combinations whose appeal often
works on a subconscious level.
The creator of these works, like
the abstract expressionists, can be described as a conduit
for the creative spirit that resides within us all, but
is released only by those individuals who are both talented
and determined enough to acquire the skills for self-expression.
In the case of Matt Lamb, those highly expressive skills
are self-taught, which makes them all the more extraordinary.
Since 1986, Matt Lamb has held nearly 70 oneperson
exhibitions in leading galleries and public spaces throughout
the United States, Europe, Argentina, and Mexico. His
work is included in numerous prestigious collections,
such as those of the Vatican Museums, Rome; the National
Treasury, Washington, D.C.; the State of Illinois, Chicago;
Pierre Cardin, Paris; Knoxville Art Museum, Ten nessee;
Rockford Art Museum. Illinois; and The Spertus Museum
of Judaica, Chicago.
Lamb's latest work, "Millenium Project," has
three parts. Its first part, 10 paintings altogether,
was unveiled at the Vatican on April 15, 1999. The second,
measuring a monumental 12 by 64 feet, has been completed
for the University of St.Thomas in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Another 30- by 20-foot work created for the university
will travel to London, where it will become part of the
spectacular final component: a series of twelve 9- by
12-foot panels to be unveiled in June 2000 at Westminster
Cathedral in celebration of the millennium.
Lamb is considered a contradiction
in the art world, because he is a sophisticated person
who expresses his art in a naive manner. Some critics consider
him an "outsider" artist
and others do not, but most agree that his work is superb.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to present his work
to South Florida.
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Matt Lamb: The Chaos of Modern Life
by Carol Damian, Ph.D. Chair, Art Department
Florida International University Miami, September 1999
Appeared in Catalogue: "Matt Lamb, Another World"
Painting can be a more immediate and
direct vehicle of expression than verbal
language, and for the self-taught painter,
unfettered by preconceived theory and
aesthetic expectations, the act of
painting can often produce bold, even
daring results. Matt Lamb is a self-taught
artist with a freshness of imagination
and audacious spirit who creates vibrant
and fascinating paintings that are
his personal response to
the world around him, its people, places
and events. It is a modern world, an
often absurd and chaotic world, and
he replies to life's complexities with
an uninhibited instinctive style of
painting that is as physically vibrant
as it is insightful.
As an autodidacht, Matt Lamb found
his own way into painting late in life,
after a career as a businessman, when
a personal crisis drove him to dedicate
all of his energies to painting. Once
he started to paint in earnest, he
was intention-al v far removed from
the pinnacles of high art al d its
traditionally finite definitions, and
it is this very isolation that permits
him to create images of great introspection
and existential significance. Drawn
from the inner depths of th. subconscious
and ranging from icons of despair to
passionate cries of innocent joy, the
sheer pathos and melodrama of his highly
personal images have a universal appeal
that probably can be attributed to
the childlike vision that drives their
very creation. As he experiences creativity
in terms of ecstasy, jubilation, frenzy,
vision, delirium, anger, fear, possession,
and the like, he invites our participation
and desire to emulate such feelings.
The empathetic response to the chaos
of mod-ern life that Matt Lamb evokes
through his paintings is horn of a
personal philosophy that questions
life and death. His works bear frank
testimony to his own expressive assessments
and romantic exaggeration of ideas
and events, real or imagined. As he
transcends the recognizably physical
and perhaps attempts to reenact a highly
original spiritual creativity of his
own, he is intent on revealing the
higher sensibilities and tense passions
that dw?Il beyond the sphere of reason.
It is nature, rot reason, that plays
a major metaphysical role in his ideology.
The idea of nature is called upon to
protest, question, comment on, and
defend the positive and negative aspects
of civilization.
According to the philosophy of Matt
Lamb, we all are related in our natural
surroundings, and with our natural
surroundings, and we play different
roles in action and interaction. This
relationship includes the spiritual
as well as the physical world, and
the cycle of life and death is essential
to its harmony and balance. Ile st
es life as a continuum that transcends
spheres of existence and is mysterious
and quixotic. When death threatened
to intervene and disrupt his earthly
endeavors, he began to question the
complex interplay between the earthly
and sp+ritual spheres and his own place,
indeed all mankind's place, in the
universe. He sou ,ht refuge in the
imaginary world of his paintings and
invented a cast of characters and their
remarkable environment. With a sense
of wit and humor, and a fair degree
of irony and a iticism, Lamb depends
on his characters to bring his world
out of physical chaos and into the
light of a new spiritual reality.
Symbolic of
this journey out of chaos, the paintings
of Matt Lamb are horn like volcanic
eruptions out of a magic crucible
of paint, sand, cement, and other
materials concocted on a "mother
hoard" that is dipped, distorted,
tortured, and burned with a torch to
become a synthesis of disparate components.
As he coarsens the oils by creating
emulsions and adulterating its sensuousness
with grit and tar and other non-art
materials, new surfaces emerge. The
textures of ancient walls, turbulent
seas, far horizons, and fiery explosions
appear as the backdrop for his endeavors.
Extraordinary surface effects result
from his obsessive interaction with
subject and substance, and like a reflection
of life itself, a message is revealed
from within its depths that inspires
the painting to continue and strange
characters to emerge. Each work is
a transformation of substance that
produces a metamorphosis of' the physical
world, from organic to inorganic, human
to plant to animal, real to purely
imaginary. He performs like an alchemist,
changing raw materials into fervid
strokes of paint that induce the emergence
of his special personalities, his "family" of
characters who act as surrogates or
metaphors for his own subconscious
and its mythic journey.
On their mythic
journey from deep within the human
psyche, Lamb's characters assume
purely imaginative forms derived
from human and animal sources. Horses
and Indians, singing angels, "purple
people-eaters," and dancing flowers
are among the cast of creatures who
perform their rituals of enchantment.
He conjures up their presence from
the depths of his mutilated surfaces,
and they find release in their reactivated
spiritual energy. These visionary images
express a myriad of ideas as they metamorphosize
from plant to animal to human to spiritual
levels of existence. Crowded into their
own imaginary world, Lamb's figures
bear mask-like faces and a strange
and incomplete corporeal presence.
Flat, colorful, and imprecise, they
become the vehicles of his exploration
into such themes as duality, harmony,
life and death, the environment, the
cosmos, and social injustice. Just
as he is compelled to comment on life
itself, he frees his creatures to speak
for him from the depths of the canvas.
In fragmented narratives, they bring
his life's experiences, with their
endless quandaries, to light.
The fantastic family of Matt Lamb's
imagination is placed in dialectical
opposition to the civilized world,
the world of logic, language, and culture
itself. Dominated by mysterious natural
forces, its members possess arcane
and procreative powers. They can journey
through the cycle of life and watch
people sprout like flowers from seeds,
grow, wilt, and die to become seeds
again. Death and resurrection are obsessions
for Matt Lamb. His creatures can chastise
earth's inhabitants with stern warnings
for environmental disasters and leave
ominous dark specters to protect bright
and verdant spaces. The story of the
dispossessed becomes a chapter of the
family story, symbolized by feathered
headdresses and the paraphernalia of
shamanic ritual. Birds fly between
the earthly and heavenly realms and
prod an awakening of human consciousness
for the least suspecting. Angels and
their tantalizing equivocation between
the conceptual and the concrete move
about a painting's surface and raise
the illusion-reality conflict to a
new, higher power. Anything is possible
for Matt Lamb's family of orange horses
and yellow worms; snouted humans and
pink angels; taunting insects and sprouting
bouquets. What they share is a strange
and wonderful world of fantasy and
a heartfelt philosophy of benevolence.
Matt Lamb's fantasy is created as
a domain for creatures of love and
harmony. Instead of codifying their
presence according to high-art definitions
of beauty and ugliness, he sees them
as sources of spiritual illumination
and gives them unique signification
through strange physical attributes
and relationships that can he absurd
or poignant, and often both. Duality
guides much of his verbal language
and with astonishingly diverse approaches
to artistic exploration. Matt Lamb
uses the human condition as a point
of departure to address such dynamics
as male/female, good/evil, material/spiritual.
At the same time, one must recognize
the presence of many of his enigmatic
creatures as representative of his
own alter ego, exploring the territories
of mind and spirit in a personal quest
for peace and tranquility. Within Romantic
thought, nature is commonly viewed
as an analogue for the artistic self,
the mirror image of the individual
psyche and the very source of the artist's
powers. Matt Lamb attempts to renew
a covenant with the natural world and
with spiritual forces believed to dwell
there in order to express issues of
universal significance.
There are no important people occupying
the chaotic realm of Matt Lamb's fantasies,
only important issues. Haunting the
mutilated and distressed surfaces of
his remarkable paintings, the guardians
of earthly existence watch the progress
of humanity, condemn its insensitivity,
and celebrate its successes. In the
spirit of hope and joy, Matt Lamb's
imaginary communion with nature confronts
the chaos of the modern world and resurrects
it from the ashes of destruction to
the heights of tranquility.
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A Life-Affirming Art born of Death
by Virginia Miller, November 2001
Appeared in Catalogue: "Lamb, Peace, Tolerance, Understanding,
Hope and Love"
Matt Lamb's art is
based upon his unique philosophy, which has been shaped
by his life in a funeral home, with death as an everyday
companion. Lamb's family operated a funeral home, and
when he came of age he took over the business and expanded
it. For most of his adult life, he was on call 24 hours
a day and when the telephone rang in the middle of the
night he knew, before he picked it up, that death had
come again.
Lamb grew to accept death as another phase of life's cycle,
which applied to all living things: plants, animals, people,
all evolved from a mating of male and female components,
all grew to maturity, and all, in turn, spawned their
seeds to fertilize and begin the cycle before their demise
into the organic material that nurtured all life.
That philosophy and those creative forces are manifest
in the art that Lamb produces with a vigor and urgency
that is astonishing. At a point in life where most people
would be con tent to coast upon their accomplishments,
which in his case are extensive and significant, Lamb
is driven to paint his message over and over.
That same obsession has freed him from the technical constraints
of artists who enjoy more conventional training. Lamb
applies a wirebrush, a blowtorch, or handfuls of sand
to his paintings in a childlike freedom, sometimes achieving
results that are inexplicably arresting - a grotesque
figure with a powerful presence that speaks to viewers
like music or poetry, beyond mere words, or a shimmering
patina that other artists can only marvel at, but which
could never be reproduced.
As I stated in "Another World", the catalog
for Matt Lamb's first one-person exhibition at ArtSpace/Virginia
Miller Galleries in October 1999, the interpretation of
his paintings and sculpture "lies within the mind
of the viewer. His imaginary creatures, complex surfaces,
and luscious colours create synergistic combinations whose
appeal often works on a subconscious level."
For more than a quarter-century I have dealt in art, regularly
seeing many thousands of works in actuality or as slides
and photographs. I know hundreds, perhaps several thousand
artists. In all my experience, I have only encountered
one true visionary: Matt Lamb. His profound religious
conviction and deeply felt personal philosophy have formed
a foundation for his art that truly is unique.
This book is an excellent introduction to the work of
this extraordinary individual, but no two-dimensional
reproduction can do justice to a body of work with such
a wide range of subject matter, textures and surfaces.
There is no substitute for experiencing the art of Matt
Lamb, which I predict will be the subject of many studies
and books as the art world discovers his genius.
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