Matt Lamb Encounters Miro Book - Hc Dj 1st Edition

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Germany. smkt University Press. 2004. First edition. Hardcover Book With the dust jacket. Essays in English, German, Spanish and Catalan. … Read more Germany. smkt University Press. 2004. First edition. Hardcover Book With the dust jacket. Essays in English, German, Spanish and Catalan. 119 pages. Beautiful reproductions of Matt Lamb art.

Fearlessness of form and color, simple shapes with complex meanings, and a menagerie of fantastical creatures bubbling up from the subconscious, these hallmarks characterize the works of the late Surrealist, Joan Miro, and of the late contemporary American painter, Matt Lamb

Miro’s figures are frequently wiry and jagged, while Lamb’s are most often rounded and soft. They share in an over reaching approach. Both present an equally bizarre procession of oddly conceived animals, humans, and hybrids that fall by default into the category of non-classifiable other. And both artists concern themselves with singular visions to which the rest of us are not privy.

Matt Lamb begins each of his oil paintings with an automatic process he calls the dip, wherein he submerges a canvas in a vat filled with paints, concrete, turpentine, and a closely guarded secret recipe of other materials. He moves the canvas around in the trough according to whim, different spots within the vat affecting the painting’s eventual composition in different ways. Then, he lifts the canvas from the primordial ooze in which its background was born, flips it face up, and has his way with it with brushes, whisk brooms, or simply his fingers. It is a kind of digital ballet, this exercise in pure action painting, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, lasting for only ten or twenty seconds, but imparting an enduring effect on what will eventually become the finished work.

“It’s not about thinking or planning,” Lamb says emphatically of this process, “it’s about emotion.”

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