Matt Lamb panintings at the Bradford University UK
UNIVERSITY OF BRADFORD
Oration delivered by Dr Fiona Macaulay on the occasion of the conferment of the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters on Matt Lamb, 17 July 2009 .
Chancellor,
I am pleased to present to you, for the award of Honorary Doctorate of Letters at the University of Bradford , Matt Lamb, artist and peace activist. Most of us aspire to one stellar achievement in our lives: Matt has made several outstanding contributions, all of them marked by deep compassion for the human condition and the ability to think big and bold.
Matthew James Lamb was born on 7 April 1932 into a Catholic, Irish-American family that ran one of the largest undertakers in Chicago . Dyslexic, he scraped through high-school graduation, attended mortuary school, took management classes and, with his brother, transformed the family business into a multi-million dollar concern. Success brought wealth and social status as he and his wife -- his childhood sweetheart and constant support, Rose -- became stars in Chicago ’s political and cultural firmament. But Matt Lamb’s life changed forever in 1980 when he found himself diagnosed with three life-threatening illnesses centred on his liver – perhaps no coincidence as he was then recovering from the alcoholism brought on by stress and overwork. He vowed to Rose that if he pulled through he would give up his businesses to paint fulltime. To her astonishment, he did both. He sold his businesses and in 1984 began to paint obsessively and prolifically.
Within a few years he began to exhibit in local galleries with a style so distinctive that those
who saw his work immediately invited him to exhibit and create special installations, as he has done in various sacred buildings around the world, ranging from the cathedrals of Mannheim and Westminster and the Vatican Museum , to the crypt of the little parish church in Tünsdorf , Germany , and the catacombs of the St Peters Church in St Petersburg . Whilst he has exhibited in museums, private galleries and government buildings around the world, he has a special affinity with modern European, especially Spanish, artists, and has worked closely with the artistic foundations representing the legacies of Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, exhibiting his own response alongside their art. He has just come from the opening, in Barcelona , of a permanent exhibition of work of his own and Salvador Dali’s work, a project that will be replicated in Chicago and, excitingly, here at the University of Bradford .
Matt Lamb is a self-taught artist, which has freed him from artistic conventions, most evident in the way in which he prepares his canvasses, dipping them in an industrial mixture of gesso, concrete, turpentine and paints that are deemed to be mutually incompatible. They take over a year to dry and acquire a unique depth and texture. In the early days, Matt tried all kinds of unconventional techniques, from burying his canvases in sand, to driving over them with trucks and attacking them with blowtorches. However, his untutored style, combined with his commercial success, has defied categorisation, a problem only for those critics who like their artists pigeon-holed. Could he really be termed an ‘Outsider’ to the art world, an artistic ingénu? None of those labels matters to Matt, whose art has in any case evolved from a visionary, naïve figurative style, depicting flowers, animals and human shapes, to a sophisticated abstract expressionist style.
What is constant in his art, however, is its spiritual content, and his instinctive, fearless
approach to colour and texture. Much of his work features what he calls ‘spirits’, insistent presences that populate his imagination and his canvasses. Like Matt they can be playful, earthy, and joyful, yet they also represent eternal themes such as the struggle between good and evil, life and death. An ease with mortality reflects, of course, his previous life as a funeral director. Fertility and gestation are common tropes in his work, evident both figuratively and in his protracted ‘generational technique’ with which he builds up, and often then destroys, layers not just of paint but also of images on his canvasses. Matt is no cryptic artist, who leaves the exegesis of his work in the eyes of the beholder. He is voluble about his paintings whose message of a shared human spirituality that transcends religious and social differences, and of hope for a more peaceful world, he wants to reach the largest possible audience.
Matt’s social engagement was evident from his earliest days, as he tactfully handled the raw grief of relatives and ensured that those with little means were always assured a dignified service. For his humanitarian and ecumenical activities he has been twice knighted by the Vatican . However, in Spring 2002 there came an opportunity to throw his talents behind an even larger cause.
An organization in Washington DC invited him to help 38 young people who had lost parents in the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 . In the ‘Good Grief Camp for Young Survivors’ he hit upon the potent symbol of the umbrella as a metaphor for solidarity and tolerance. The shaft of the umbrella represents universal energy, the canopy divine protection and acceptance, the spokes the individual’s strengths, the sections the key component’s of a person life, such as family, religion, friends. The children painted the outside of the umbrellas with representations of themselves, their hopes, dreams, personality. On the underside they pasted images of their grief, loss and fears. Together they paraded out to meet the waiting press, led by Matt singing ‘When the saints go marching in’, a picture of optimism and human resilience in the face of tragedy and irrational hatred. The image was so powerful that Matt was invited to carry out similar workshops with at-risk youth in Chicago , and soon the project travelled, quite spontaneously, around the world. To date hundreds of thousands of young people have painted umbrellas and paraded for peace in over two dozen countries, from Germany to Japan, Argentina to Australia. The project’s appeal lies in its simplicity and accessibility to all ages and abilities. Seeing the success of the Umbrellas for Peace Project convinced Matt that his artistic output, commercially and critically successful as it was, should be put to the service of inspiring a new generation to become peacemakers. The University of Bradford and its Department of Peace Studies are proud to be partners in this project.
As you leave this graduation ceremony, look around you in the Atrium and in the corridors above. There you will see over 80 of Matt’s paintings, a magnificent bequest, which have been hung, at his urging, in the public heart of the University. From the balconies hang peace umbrellas painted by local school children. To Matt, both are expressions of a powerful optimism about humanity and our shared futures.
In summary, Chancellor, I commend Matt Lamb to you for his contributions to contemporary art and his commitment to a more peaceful world. He is a man who does not understand the meaning of the word ‘can’t’, whose combination of stubbornness, creativity, vision, faith and sheer hard graft we must surely salute. As Matt says, ‘Can art change the world? Absolutely.’
