Hi, bloggers – Richard Speer here, Matt’s blog editor.

Reading Matt’s post last week about how he views surface as an element of painting, I was reminded of the link between his studio practices and his peace activism.  This is a connection that is not always self-evident, and which I believe not everyone fully understands.

In my biography of Matt, Matt Lamb:  The Art of Success (John Wiley & Sons, 2005), I strove to clarify this connection.  The recent post reminds me of the need to reiterate it for the benefit of new fans.

Those just discovering Matt’s work—his work both in art and the peace process—may view these as two discrete activities, as if there is Matt Lamb the internationally exhibited painter; and an identical-looking Matt Lamb who works for a better world via activist programs like the “Umbrellas for Peace.”  It is tempting to look at these personae as only casually related, or as two distinct aspects of one individual.

But I maintain that the link between these personae is critical to grasping the full impact of each.

As he discussed in his post, Matt employs a process he calls “The Dip,” which consists of dunking canvases and panels in a vat of wildly divergent and at times fundamentally incompatible media:  oil paint, water-based paint, inks, concrete, gesso, and turpentine, among others.  Upon contact with the canvas, these media immediately begin repelling and attacking one another, cracking, pooling, separating—and keep doing so for months and months as they slowly dry.

Ugly pockmarks, tectonic rifts, and grisly coagulations ensue.  Matt prods the process along, slashing pustules of paint with the fervor of a psychotic dermatologist and letting them drain, seep, and bleed over random or determined sections of the composition.

Nothing is sacrosanct.  In one painting I am particularly familiar with, an intrusive line of green paint drools down through Matt’s signature.  He had signed the painting, thinking it was done, after which a pregnant crust of paint above decided to rupture, sending the viscous ooze sliming down, desecrating the signature.

Except that it wasn’t desecration.  Nothing in a Lamb painting is a desecration, because this artist subscribes to the Panglossian worldview that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

I will never forget my first meeting with Matt in Chicago in the fall of 2002.  At the conclusion of our many days of interviews, he graciously offered me a small painting of my choice from his massive studio, as a token of thanks for my time and interest.  I picked the one I loved the most, a gorgeous green abstract.  Subsequently I noticed it had the aesthetic equivalent of a large skin tag barely hanging onto the surface.  It certainly added character to the piece, yet I wondered whether it would survive shipping intact.

Not wanting to offend him in any way, I asked gingerly:  “Matt, this piece right here...”  I pointed at it.  “...seems to be a little loose.  Should I be worried about whether it might come off in shipping?”

Without warning he grabbed the errant chunk and unceremoniously ripped it off.

I felt the air go out of my lungs.

“No,” he answered.

To Matt, painting is an improvisatory geologic process, a natural history of volcanic explosions, lava flow, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other acts of God or the hand of the artist.  Anything that happens to a painting, happens for a reason and adds to its character, narrative, and intrinsic value.  Nothing about his technique is fastidious; it is, rather, chaotic and destructive, yet ultimately cohesive.

This cohesion is the crux.  The antagonistic relationship between the elements in the Dip—which finally resolve into the harmonic symphonies we see in the finished works—is directly analagous to his mantra of peace, tolerance, understanding, hope, and love.  The peoples of the world, like the elements of his Dip, are heterogeneous and in any conventional sense irreconcilable.  An absolute belief in the resurrection of Christ will not reconcile with allegiance to Allah or the polytheistic phantasmagoria of Hinduism or the noncommitality of agnosticism, etc.

Matt is adamant that the antidote to this irresolvability is not genocide, but tolerance.  Just as his media eventually find a way to coexist—and moreover, to become beautiful together—on the picture plane, so Matt works toward a world in which social, religious, and moral polarities can coexist without recourse to violence.

It is a laissez-faire, patchwork-quilt, melting-pot view that recurs as a motif through his discourse like the never-ending chorus of Disney World’s “It’s a Small World...”  He admits it is a Pollyanna dream and a quixotic fool’s errand, yet he paints and lives for it every day.  He is determined to manifest in the waking world what he manifests in the alchemical dreamland of his studio.

Year after year in his Dips and drying process and painting and tweaking, he sees violence and ugliness resolve into beauty.  If it can happen in art, why can’t it happen in daily life?

This is the impetus for the peace programs, the painting of umbrellas, the speeches and parades and workshops and meetings with dignitaries, the restless roiling around the world by a man who is not content to putter around a studio and perhaps have a show every other year at a local gallery.

This is what drives Matt Lamb in his dual personae as artist and activist:  a crusade to bridge the gap between what is possible in a painting and what is possible on a planet.

Richard Speer
Portland, Oregon
January 14, 2010