Dear bloggers....

Richard Speer, your Blog editor, here...

Last week Matt mentioned the Diary Pages, the 1992 coffee table book published by Joffe Galleries, Inc.  For this book, Matt created 16 works on paper, which he inscribed with text.  These texts comprised of observations about the world, told in a whimsical, lilting meter calls attention to the follies, foibles, and pretensions of the world as well as to its more serious or heroic aspects.

It’s hard to believe that 1992 was nearly 17 years ago, but it was.  In 1992, Matt had been painting only 8 years.  But as the Diary Pages show, many of his signature ideas were already well-formed.  His conceptual agenda was well on its way to fulfillment.

As I looked through the book last week, I was struck by both how much things have changed, and how much they have stayed the same, in Matt’s world.  As Matt himself likes to say, looking at his work is like taking a trip “back to the future.”  It is an intriguing study, how visual and thematic motifs appear, disappear, reappear, and circle around as in a Möbius strip.  Here are some of my thoughts as I revisited the book:

Pictorially, the works on paper that comprise the Diary Pages provide a good example of Matt’s early style, which was naive and often seen as falling within the Outsider Art movement.  In 1992, Matt had yet to discover “The Dip,” his groundbreaking technique of preparing a canvas or wood panel by submerging it in a solution of disparate, often antagonistic materials.  This innovation had profound implications to the remainder of Matt’s work up to and including the present day.  But Matt did not discover “The Dip” until the spring of 1995.  In 1992, he was still developing a cast of characters, including animals, people, and hybrids of the two, working basically from the ground up, beginning with a blank canvas.

Matt had been developing other ways of distressing the canvases prior to painting—he notoriously ran over them with his car, threw them into the washing machine with rocks, threw them into the Atlantic Ocean at his Florida home and watched them in the waves until they came back to shore, buried them in the sand, and various other techniques, which his friend and mentor Simone Nathan called “terrorizing the canvas.”  These techniques helped Matt jump-start his process.  They gave him something to work with:  not a blank canvas but a bruised canvas, a wrinkled canvas, which, like a wrinkled human face, had character to build upon.

To view a pre-1995 Matt Lamb painting is to realize two things:  1)  The building blocks of his pictorial vocabulary, most notable the characters and spirits that characterize his figurative painting, were already present in his work from early on; and 2)  Formally, he has evolved incredible technical advances since 1995, which have given his works textural properties that verge on the virtuosic.

In terms of the text that accompanies these works, some of them are extraordinarily prescient; others show the continuity in his line of thinking; and all show the blend of profundity and absurdity that is the trademark of Lamb the philosopher.

Matt often juxtaposes polarities in a dialectic fashion, suggesting that by encompassing oppositions, we better understand the duality of man, a fundamental tenet of his worldview.  He views humankind as a union of material and spiritual—elements that are often at war with one another and rarely, but beautifully, in harmony.

In Diary Pages, Matt presents the idea of an individual who is dualistic.  The individual is in control of his destiny, and is a morally upstanding person—until he looks in the mirror and sees a clown or a devil.  The individual looks at the important deeds and actions he takes—then discovers they are “full of cheese.”  The individual is riding astride a majestic stallion, the two of them riding in the direction of great adventures—until the individual admits he has no idea where the stallion is leading.

The book also presents an idealized version of the life of the artist.  Matt posits the artist as a clown:  not serious, not emotionally heavy, but able “to skip lightheartedly through life, never worrying about what others will say.”  This was Matt’s fantasy of the artist’s life.  In his first career as an undertaker, he had to maintain extraordinary decorum, which was at times contrary to his wild and often surreal imagination.  He also had to be painstaking sensitive to the desires, traditions, feelings, and judgments of other people.

While Blake-Lamb Funeral Homes was sold to Service Corporation International in November of 1987, Matt continued in an advisory capacity to Service Corps. for many years.  He also continued to stay involved in many business dealings, which prohibited him from living the truly devil-may-care life of the bohemian artist until much more recently.  This may be subconsciously referred to in Matt’s invocation of the Jester, who has to juggle so many balls, as Matt had to juggle so many responsibilities and wear so many hats during that transitional period of his life.  His remark of:  “No wonder the juggler is so tired”—he has to juggle in his sleep—gives some indication of the professional pivoting that was such a part of his psychological makeup.

So Matt’s rhapsodic fantasias in Diary Pages of having a light-hearted, clownlike disregard for the value judgments of others, is an early projection of his desire to leave the world of business and devote himself full-time to the pursuit of art, which for him has always consisted dually of exposing human pretensions and pointing to a more authentic human experience through peace, tolerance, understanding, hope, and love.

Matt’s Manichean worldview, his Pollyanna versus Patton mentality, comes across when he calls life a “battleground” in which “we awaken with love in our hearts but armed to the teeth against whatever adversity might befall us.”

Self-responsibility has long been a Lamb theme.  Matt is concerned with turning victims into victors rather than hearing a succession of sob stories from the oppressed.  In the Diary Pages, he says, “The path we crawl is our own; the rocks and glass are our own.”

Finally, Matt shows a glimpse of the message he has gone on to spread around the world when he observes that art is charged with rediscovering the lost flowering of ancient cultures:  their wisdom, trials, philosophy, spirituality, and art.  “It is here all around us,” he declares in the book.  “We must find it.  How?”

He has spent the last 17 years looking for the answer.  Has he found it?  Matt doesn’t think so; he is always looking over the next hill, always looking around the next bend; he says if he ever believed his work as a painter were finished, he would take up tap-dancing.  But in a larger sense, if, as is often said, “the journey is the destination,” then perhaps Matt has found the wisdom of the ages.  Luckily for us, he hasn’t found all of it yet.

Richard Speer
Blog editor
November 28, 2008