April 2024 Unicorn Of The Month Kirstin Lamb

Were you ever on Club House? For a brief period of time during Covid, if you had an invite and an iPhone, you were on this app. Launched in the early days of The Pandemic, Club House was a voice only social media app that allowed anyone who had the app the opportunity to talk to anyone else who had the app. It doesn't sound exciting at this moment, but for a short period of time, it was exhilarating. I became aware of Kirstin through one of the many art themed chat rooms and knew at some point I would feature her here. Aside from her work gorgeous, multi layered work, her vast knowledge of art history, and her quirky sense of humor, she has talked me down from many a metaphorical ledge.  

1. Tell me about you as a person. The name in which you prefer to go by. Where are you based? What are your origins, where are you from, etc.?

Kirstin Lamb - I just go by my name. It's a fun one, I'm named after my mom's favorite student, from her German classes when she taught middle school. I didn't change my last name when I married, but I do have some folks who persist in trying to call me by my husband's last name. There are also many interpretations of my first name, that are not quite right. I am KIRSTIN, two Is no EEs, but it sounds like there are EEs. (Phonetically it would probably be written as KEERSTIN, so that is always fun. Yay fun names, hard names. I'm wrong in so many databases. It you try to email me and I don't respond, try to re-spell my name - the spell check autocorrects to Kristen.) And yeah, she/her.

I'm based in Providence, RI with a studio in Pawtucket, RI. I grew up in New Jersey and came to Rhode Island and New England for school and never left. It is like a more relaxed version of metro New York. My father grew up in the town I was raised in, Summit, NJ. Most people know it as a nice place to switch trains on the way to New York. My mother ended up in New Jersey after escaping from East Germany with her family in the 1950s. My grandfather was recruited by the US government and he brought my mom, grandmom and aunt to the area of New Jersey near Asbury Park and Long Branch. My childhood was an interesting negotiation between NJ teen and second generation child of an immigrant.

I currently live in Providence with my husband and three cats. Our home and pets are a refuge from the demands of life outside. I fill the house with patterns and artwork, my husband gives me a huge amount of space and I give him tons of credit. He is the best.

2. How long have you been practicing art professionally, when did you consider yourself a real artist?

I think I started to define myself as an artist after I graduated from my Post Baccalaureate at the Museum School in Boston. I started selling work and kept a regular studio. That felt like a definition to me. But I've been drawing since I was tiny. I had this babysitter who drew for me when I was really little, and I was captivated and evidently asked her to draw all the things. And then in late grammar school I would make drawings to make friends. So I was drawing a lot before I ever got schooling, it was just a thing I did.

3. Did you go to art school? Tell me about your training, formal and informal.

Right so I started answering this above, but I think our training is lifelong yeah? So all through secondary school drawing and then painting were always there in the background. I was a school nerd, so I think my parents and teachers pushed me beyond the art studio. I am super grateful for all the writing I did before I focused on painting more full time. That said, I went to college expecting to study writing, maybe advertising, or computer science. I did study those things, but I got the gift of time in a stunning studio building with amazingly supportive faculty at my undergrad institution, Brown University. Brown has a strangely pointy art program for a school immediately next to one of the country's strongest art schools, RISD. 

It was a gift, I didn't have to be as good as a RISD student, I was just a Brown student who painted. It helped a lot that I was with a lot of smart people that just let me play and think in the paint without worrying about outcome or mastery. I found wonderful mentors in artists Wendy Edwards, Leslie Bostrom, Marlene Malik and Walter Feldman. And it had a beautiful view over the entire city of Providence. It was a special place, I'm grateful for it.

Then I did my Post Baccalaureate at the Museum School (now Tufts), which was a great introduction to the Boston art scene. At the time I went there, nearly everyone who showed in Boston taught a little bit at the Museum school or right nearby. It was a vivid and crazy community, with the Post Baccalaureate cohort giving it just the right amount of structure. I met some wonderful artists in my time there.

Then I did a year off as I applied to grad school, working part time in a range of ways, but most importantly working for artist Nan Freeman, who was at that time co-head of the Post Baccalaureate program. It was such a special time, Nan makes these huge charcoal drawings of hats and tiaras, she was just wonderful to work for and with.

Then I went to graduate school at RISD in painting. Perhaps the hardest of my schooling experiences, I felt consistently like I was behind in skills, though I conceptually felt like I knew what I wanted. It was a daunting and pressure filled experience but I'm super grateful for the time and challenge. I think I wouldn't be the painter I am without my time there. It was hard. There were also wonderful mentors there too, painters like Julia Jacquette, Dike Blair, Holly Hughes, Duane Slick, and Dennis Congdon. Oh and sculptor Sheila Pepe was an important part of my time in the painting department too, she was a fabulous critic at just the right time for many of us.

Ok, that is probably enough about training yeah? There is so much more to say about informal training too, I'm super grateful for the first studio I moved into a year after my MFA, the River Street Artists in Waltham, MA. It was a wonderful collective space and I felt mentored and cared for in a way I never thought possible in a studio environment. That place is full of special artists to this day. I think I'm a better artist because of who I have gotten to spend time with in the studio, and on residencies as well. I'm super grateful for the community I have had.

4. What is the medium(s) that you prefer to work in and tell why?

I work primarily in acrylic and acrylic gouache paint. I was trained to paint in oil as an undergraduate, but soon moved to acrylic for its flexibility and dry time. I was also really interested in pouring paint around 2001-2004, so that was all acrylic all the time. I've moved on from the pouring, but I still use acrylic for its flexibility and quick dry times. Also, I've noticed is that I have some studio sensitivities to oil media, specifically certain varnishes and thinners. I feel it is a good choice for me to only paint in oil outside.

5.Who are some of your art inspirations? What are some of your non-art inspirations?

I was obsessed with Dutch still life in graduate school, literally infatuated. I think my exposure until that time had been limited, so what other students found rote, I found fascinating and new. I drew heaps of fruit, flowers and skulls in this weird mechanical way as a kind of homage to vanitas purveyors like Jan Davidsz De Heem and Rachel Ruysch.

After school I started to get into the work of David Teniers, his paintings of paintings. I was also looking heavily at Kunstkammers, cabinets of curiosity. My work from that time is a kind of heap/hybird of a kunstkammer and sumptuous still life.

Lately I've been looking heavily at French wallpaper and vintage cross stitch and embroidery. My work is sometimes literally derived from these sources in a kind of hybrid form. I'm obsessed with anything with a charted color pattern or silkscreened color progression.

6. When do you know when a work is finished?

I feel like as a teacher this is one of the questions I get asked most. And it is different for different types of art and artists. Hard to always answer the same way.

Lately, I have been making these all-over finished works, perhaps over-finished. But I'm happy to be there right now. I have been completing patterns I make for myself to see what that looks like before I re-edit and remix them into other patterns and works. I think I need to re-make a thing in my hand before I play around with it in collage. So finish is a moving target. I don't have a great answer to this right now. I think my answer to this was better when I was an abstract oil painter in college. All I can say is finish shifts for what you need at the moment.

7. Tell me about your process when working. Do you listen to music or do any rituals to get yourself ready to make art?

I work on multiple paintings at a time, usually 10-12, all over the walls of my studio, usually allowing the paint and ideas to criss-cross between them. I love to pre-mix tons of color, I've been doing this since I was an undergraduate. I now have tons of paint-pots to save all manner of colors, as well as obsessive charts and documents floating around.

I like to drink tea. Lots of tea. My favorites are a really posh mint tea and PG Tips for when I need caffeine. Steady drip of tea all day long.

I listen to music, but lately I'm obsessed with listening to audiobooks. Audiobooks sucked when they were on CDs, it is such a revelation to be able to download and listen to an entire catalog of a writer's work. I listen to a huge range. Right now I'm listening to Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, because I'm working heavily on woods paintings for an upcoming show. I am also leading a Woods book club on the Netvvrk artist site hosted by Paddy Johnson. It has been interesting to focus my listening/reading on exactly what I'm making. Usually things are more sideways - like I will listen to mysteries or crime dramas that take place in the woods.

I also get to look outside while I'm in the studio. Though my mill building is in an industrial area, I get to see the sun set frequently, and there is the harsh glare of winter sun in the afternoons. It is a nice place. I try to always fill it with the things I want to be with so I go as much as I can.

8. What are the meanings and the concepts behind this particular body of work?

I have multiple bodies of work concurrently going. This is the easiest way to explain, a short statement about each.

Embroidery Paintings.

I make labor-intensive images of labor-intensive textiles and patterns.

I call the gridded high-detail paintings on transparent acetate embroidery paintings. In order to paint the images that are not already patterns set on a grid, I generate a digitized grid and paint each gridded stitch by hand with acrylic and acrylic gouache on a wet media acetate. This is a simple process of re-painting a textile or pattern, sometimes an invented image-generated textile, sometimes an actual knit or textile pattern (cross stitch or embroidery). The brush creates a one-to-one relationship of mark to stitch, each mark stands in for a move of the needle.

Many of the embroidery paintings I make are images of floral wallpaper cropped from French wallpaper of the 17th, 18th and 19thcentury. Much of the other embroidery paintings were made using vintage embroidery patterns from the 50s, 60s and 70s or generated from my own photography, primarily of interiors, landscapes and portraits.

Parts of this series are generated from images of French wall decoration made following the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the late 1700s. These works were deliberately cropped from texts discussing the shift in pattern before and after the discovery of those ruins, and the elaborate color and design shifts that occurred after the unearthing of the frescos. I am particularly interested in the political moment that created this shift and its need for this decoration and the need for the classical power invested in this kind of antiquity at that moment. The re-presenting of this particular decorative moment is for me an echoing of the darker uses of antiquity as a stand in for beauty and power.

Floral Remix. 

These paintings encompass hybrid embroidery, cross stitch, collage and digital mark-making under-drawings which I over-paint with the same labor and care as the patterns on acetate. I make a layered digital collage, usually using current and past painting patterns, and I cut and chop the patterns, draw in new marks and wallpapers. I feel these are the most expressive and abstract of the work I'm currently doing, allowing me to play with calligraphic mark-making and humor.

Woods.

I'm currently making a series of woods paintings of varying sizes, mostly composed of New England woods that I have walked through on foot. The works are made from digital patterns I make from photographs, which I then paint on wet media acetate. The patterns are derived from the photographs, but also abstract and blur the photograph to a greater or lesser degree, depending upon scale and complexity of the image.

I'm looking for a painting whose marks land between textile stitch, Impressionist mark and digital pixel. The paintings I'm making blur between a focused Photorealism, a computer-generated pattern and a fetishized repetition of an acrylic paint mark. Much of what I do is mix and organize color. That the excess of labor behind the picture surprisingly makes each one seem more immediate and present.

I want the experience of my paintings to be much like walking in the woods. Surrounded by a fabric of green, an excess of detail, the labor of making the painting stands as a devotional homage to the complexity and slow growth of the forest.

Pictures of Pictures.

I paint pictures of my studio wall and studio floor.

In my studio I hang a range of objects on the wall and arrange things on the floor. The pictures function as images of a studio, but also a kind of curation of my wall of inspiration, love, compulsion, collections.

My paintings depict salon scenes, collections, and studio walls filled with pinned imagery and arrays of leaning paintings from my prop collection. These pictures are derived from a fascination with cabinets of curiosity and paintings of paintings ranging from Matisse's Red Studio to David Teniers' depictions of the collection of Archduke Leopold of Austria. I am interested in a kind of comedic curation-as-painting.

I feel a need to lionize the project of the artist, all artists, especially at a moment of great precarity and conflict. My love of studio as a refuge, bunker, or some might say dubious ivory tower, is equally tempered by what I feel is an interest in the concrete way studios suggest individual and collective wishes and dreams.

9.What do you want viewers would take away from your work?

I don't think about the takeaway quite so deliberately. I guess I hope folks are curious and visually satiated. I stand in the visual pleasure camp, it must first be something you are willing to sit with, before you start to think about all the content I might want you to take away. I guess work for me is kind of like pointing at things I think are important or valuable. Things that might go unseen or undocumented.

10.What are your biggest goals as a visual artist? And what has been your proudest moment professionally?

I have been working toward solo shows in galleries since I was about 25, when I graduated from MFA. I recently started having solo shows in commercial galleries and it has been such a gift to work with the talented Jennifer Terzian and Meg White and Andrea Dabrila of Gallery Naga, on solo shows for work I really love. I feel really blessed to have amazing support. I am now making a goal to keep showing and painting for the rest of my life, looking to support my studio and beyond.

My other goal is to keep showing up for the folks who have helped me and been wonderful. I feel like I have been given so many gifts in the people who have worked with me, residencies who have given me time and space to develop my work. I'm just grateful. So many to name but please look closely at The Wassaic Project, The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and The Atlantic Center for the Arts. I hope to be able to help them all as I continue to nurture my work.

Proudest moment is always when I finish my next painting, I know that is goofy, but it is the best. I will never get tired of finishing things I have worked a long time on. I'm someone who works on many paintings at a time, and many of them are slow high-labor things. So finishing them is a kind of party.

11. Has there ever been a time in your life when you doubted your abilities as an artist? To the point that you wanted to give up? If so, how did you pull yourself out of it? 

How could you not have this and be an artist? I think it is hard to trust that you are doing the right thing all the time. And frankly doubt makes some good paintings. I have many of my painting students read "Cezanne's Doubt" from Sense and Non-sense by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I feel like some of our best painters have been guided by doubt and second-guessing, who am I to assume I should always feel good about things? I sometimes make work about my state of mind, and my doubt paintings are some of my favorites. I think I have one that just has DOUBT scrawled over it somewhere. Maybe I have a few of those, come to think of it. Art-making is humbling. It is a strange way to pass your days, make a living, engage in being human. Of course doubt comes with that.

How did I pull myself out of giving up? Hmm, I think that is a daily thing. I have habits and compulsions that keep the weirdest doubt-monsters at bay, but I think of every day as turning toward the work in some way. It helps. I also am well treated for mental illness and seasonal depression - daylight lamps are important for folks who live in the Northeast. Also, stay fixed on what you want from your painting/art-making. I guess I'm just always excited to see the next thing. I want to show and sell, but I also want to make the thing I'm making now.

To view more Kirstin's work, visit her Website, follow her on Instagram, and get yourself to the Jennifer Terzian Gallery in Litchfield, CT April 27, because Kirstin has a solo show there!