I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

He listened to their sorrow. He watched the grief and pain of each person that was exposed by the loss of one dear. For decades Matt Lamb, as an orchestrator of wakes, comforted and counseled those who attended these rituals of mourning and lament. Letting go is as painful as birth, and likewise, the process is exaggerated, awkward, and steaming with excess. At the age of fifty-four after decades of immersion in funerary rites, Matt Lamb began to concoct paintings with similar, ritualistic pathos. Now, as a conduit of profound and apostolic spiritual beliefs, the artist’s paintings function as a contemporary Saint Teresa of Avila, telling stories of ecstatic and mythic comport.

The infinitive “to paint,” however, does not fully describe or envelop Lamb’s processes. Simple brushes, paint, and canvas will not do. Each painting’s coming into being is both as gruesome and joyful as the process of birth and death. Indeed to paint, Lamb states, is: “dying to the self to be open to life, dying to the material to be open to the expanse.”

The artist starts each painting by laying it in a trough of concrete, gesso, and pigment. In time it evolves into its first state, an accretion of texture, evocative forms, and color. As in the Surrealists’ automatic mark?making and discovery of correlative symbols, Lamb begins to sense his subject, to find buried within the surface of paint, sand, and grit an efflorescence that bespeaks life. In the second generation, the raw canvases are stacked against each other and then peeled apart, finding, as in a Rorschach test, further layered, subliminal suggestions of germinal forms.

Paint expressed directly from the tube, pails of powdered pigment mixed

with thick, viscous linseed oil, spatulas and putty knives, sand, concrete, and plaster are all materials and tools that Lamb uses to apply color and shape to these modern?day icons. Each layer dries and congeals into a type of sediment or molten mass, causing the composite material to wrinkle, crack, and fuse into hybrid fissures. Clearly this is not a lesson in academic deportment or the control of an image, but is rather akin to Jacob wresting with the angel, a struggle that bears no predictable outcome but instead traces, indeed inscribes, a passionate journey.

As the process continues, Matt Lamb seeks out a narrative drama that might unfold within each work. Flat figures emerge predominately in profile or are frontally iconic. There is no need for Renaissance space as these paintings are not about man’s mastery or power. Instead the figures exist ambiguously in arenas that are shallow, still, and timeless. Simplified and emblematic, they often appear Assyrian as on the walls of Assurbanipal’s palace. The conqueror, the conquered, the booty, and their attributes all tell stories that transcend time and cultural Diaspora. Lambs figures and narratives are not specific to a time or culture but stand for all time, they represent “life, death, and resurrection…the seasons…These paintings are generational, they are a conglomeration of the past.”

Working quickly and intuitively, Lamb uses color and line to further delineate the images that are a synthesis of what he both sees and imagines. Searching for a sensibility that can contain surrender and bliss at once, Lamb further scourges his surfaces with a belt sander, a rasp, Comet cleanser, a butane torch, a jet of water from a hose, a gouge, or any other tool that might lend itself to this kind of flagellation. Vast fields of compressed color are glutted with stroke and serve as landscapelike registers for the anthropomorphic elements.

In this scarred topography the artist begins to recognize figures and animals that interact or coexist abruptly and symbolically. Not rendered illusionistically, the figures are corporeal emblems: archetypes, which preclude specificity, stand for an idea. Borrowed from Augustinian absolutes, each character is an always already presence, standing for those cosmic struggles that become precise and personal as they impact

us daily.

There are flying horses, both beasts of burden that carry our troubled souls and joyous and naughty centaurs. Janus heads see the past and the future in unison, yet they are not always seers, but are instead playful. Fecund forms hearken fertility and richness of the heart as well as warn of the dangers of desire. Fish, checkered mammals (of what sort?), and beaked creatures are interposed with humanlike figures who often wear different hats. Indian headdresses, top hats, and crowns all signify a contested status and bearing. The particulars morph and coalesce differently according to our visual perspective as we view the paintings just as our perceptions shift and change in our lives. It is in the process of this evolution, this generational being and becoming, wherein narratives unfold.

Likely, it is because Lamb is self-taught and any sort of academic or descriptive rendering discomforts him, that his personas, surfaces, and color can speak to such a vast audience. Astounding passages of color are at times brutal and at other times, eloquent. The images are beguilingly childlike, yet sophisticated in their course, almost mutant texture and chromatic excess. Lamb’s raw protagonists seem at once innocent and knowing, embracing and exposing an eternal and mythic paradox that is at the core of religious belief. If this work is a codex, it is a simple one which is continually regenerating and reinventing itself as the viewer brings their life into contact with it.

For the sake of categorization and understanding as well as for commerce, critics have often placed the work of Lamb under the rubric of

Outsider Art. Evincing many outsider characteristics such as simple, robustly colorful forms, childlike immediacy, and urgent themes of morality that are at times jubilant and at others nightmarish, Lamb’s works share with Jean Dubuffet’s conception of Art Brut: that which is created in a “feverish impulse.”  Not formally or academically trained in the skills of drawing, color, or illusion, Lamb employs figural forms, compositional constructions, and color use that are neither tidy nor refined. Indeed, every expanse of color and form betrays the struggle with which it was born.

Lamb is not, however, an outsider. Fully a part of the contemporary Chicago culture in which he grew up, Lamb is a devoutly religious Roman Catholic and an observer of human behavior at times of both religious fervor and inexplicable grief.  His role as a business owner required that he communicate effectively and efficiently. In his role of orchestrating wakes and funerals, he needed to re?present the dead with

compassion for the living and reverence for life itself. In the two decades since Lamb became a painter, a decision made when he thought, mistakenly, that he himself was going to die, the artist has been exposed to art and culture internationally and transglobally. Currently maintaining studios in Chicago, Florida, rural Wisconsin, west Cork, Ireland, and Paris, Lamb has the opportunity to view and consume a vast range of artforms from prehistoric and aniconic Irish stone effigies, to the brilliant and poignant visionary stories by Marc Chagall, to contemporary operatic and dance performances for which he creates backdrops. Outside yes, but only outside of the academy and liberated from what Harold Bloom called the “anxiety of influence.”

Leaving behind the baggage of the “outsider artist,” Lamb does not create from a pathological space, but rather he creates from an old?fashioned place: inspiration. The Oxford English Dictionary defines inspiration as:  “I. Literal (physical) senses. 1. The action of blowing on or into. . . II. Figurative senses. 3. The act of inspiring. . .. a breathing or

infusion into the mind or soul. a. specific  A special immediate action or influence of the spirit of God (or of some divinity or supernatural being) upon the mind or the soul. b. general . . . the suggestion, awakening, or feeling of some kind of impulse, especially of the exalted kind.”

 Many in the past have been so inspired but it certainly is out of fashion now in a society that not only questions and challenges the notion of faith, but is driven by individualist aims. Matt Lamb attempts to rest an individualist ego and control from his process. As he explained to the author, “I’m just there for the ride. I am like a leaf floating and blowing down a fast stream.”

 “A breathing or infusion into the mind or soul,” Lamb shares his methods of inspiration with artists like Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th?century Abbess and mystic who dictated her visions for the Scivas (Know the Ways of the Lord) with layered imagery of complex iconographic meaning, yet simplistically and beautifully conceived. One can also find distinct parallels in Lamb’s work with the idiosyncratic Symbolists James Ensor and Odilon Redon whose expressionistically worked surfaces and compositions evoke both rhapsodic and tortured narratives. The 19th?century Symbolists were playing out the quintessential modern collision of the old with the new. Still germane, this perplexity and conflict infuses Lamb’s delirious canvases.

Another curious relationship might be seen to Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock’s early psychoanalytic drawings. Engaged in his own Jungian analysis, Pollock, as analysan, created drawings that emerged from his use of surrealist techniques that employed autonomic drawing and free association in order to evoke symbolic forms from the unconscious. Intent on aligning his own fractured core with the collective unconscious, Pollock sought wholeness for himself and metaphorically for all of society. Throughout the history of art, Western, Eastern, and NonWestern, are examples of visionary catharsis and revelation, most often when the society is in turmoil and, as Fredrick Jameson characterizes late?capitalism, “schizophrenic.” Matt Lamb shares this mystical belief that images can approach shamanistic import, especially in our own time of anxiety and chaos. Just as the shaman must give over to the spirits in order for energy to flow through and transform him, so too does Lamb give over to the spirit. His visions produce visceral and palpable characters that inhabit both heavenly and nether worlds rich with themes of life and death. At once ethereal and corporal, these canvases speak their universal themes loudly, without regret. Lamb explained this in a pedestrian, humble manner: “Nothing is my fault and nothing is my pleasure. I just do the grunt work.” Alas, just the gruntwork.

Matt Lamb’s visionary sensibility incubated during his years conducting wakes and funerals. These were quiet, powerful events, hushed but spilling with emotion of respect and sorrow, communion and lament, and fellowship and isolation. Perhaps these are the quintessential moments of humanity, balancing and merging life and death in a delicate paradoxical interplay.