50th Anniversary Artist Interview
Kirstin Lamb
October 2004
Art doesn’t have a finish line. It’s not measured in minutes or seconds or points or runs. There are no definitive winners or losers. In fact, the most successful art is often anti-definitive, the anti-sport, raising more questions than it answers, feeding on debate, interpretation, and reflection. At its best, art carries its own fuel, leading both the artist and the viewer toward – if not wholly original questions – at least fresh ways of looking at the same question. Which is why we were so excited about talking with Kirstin Lamb.
Kirstin is a second year graduate painting student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). We saw her work while visiting RISD in 2003, a year before we actually launched the 50th anniversary interview project. A year later, when we decided that we wanted to include a student interview – out of the hundreds of students whose work that we see every year – Kirstin was the first that we thought of. Why? Because Kirstin uses paint in ways that we, as the manufacturer, never planned. She exemplifies the ‘no finish line’ concept, creating work that casts paint and painting in a wholly new light.
When painting on canvas, Kirstin spends hours creating a spectral palette or ‘family’ of finely balanced, pour-able acrylic colors. The ‘family’ is then loaded into squeeze jars and the color is poured or puddled onto the canvas to create imagery. That’s the most conventional of her work. Even more interesting is the process in which Kirstin works with the paint film independent of any support. She pours shapes and haloes of color onto a sheet of plastic that’s been coated with mold-release. Once the puddles have spread and dried, morphing into organic and strangely anthropomorphic shapes, she peels them from the surface and uses them in surprising ways. The peeled shapes may end up stuffed and sewn to the surface of a canvas painting. Or they may serve as the outer shell of a stuffed form, a kind of post-modern plush cuddle animal. Except these stuffed animals look like they’re Star-Trek Tribbles on acid, walking a weird and wonderful line between cuddly and psychotic.
We spent the day in Kirstin’s studio at RISD, two large, in-progress canvases on the wall, the room littered with paint tubes, squeeze jars, a rubber chicken, and clippings from art magazines. And, of course, there was a menagerie of stuffed acrylic creatures making themselves fully at home, lounging about on the floor.
Liquitex: So, how did you get to this?
Kirstin Lamb: I started out pouring directly on the canvas and there were some people who suggested that I should really be making free-form stuff. I was going for this kind of cute and poisonous thing.
Liquitex: They’re a blast.
KL: They also had to seem maybe a little bit huggable, but you couldn’t quite hug them because they might be a little too scary to hug.
Liquitex: There are some really interesting juxtapositions in your work, some really challenging tensions like huggable vs. scary. There are references to classical painting and work on canvas and then there’s all this plastic. Are there any particular juxtapositions that you find to be most interesting?
KL: Wow. I guess I feel like you can’t rely on just one thing anymore. It’s like if you want to do this kind of lushness, you kind of have to do it with sort of tongue in cheek or satirical. But it also has to be sincere, like I sincerely love plastic. I mean, I’m a child of the 80’s and, you know, we’re surrounded by plastic. I wanted to use plastic as an icon, but for that to make sense, you almost have to relate it to icons of food or icons of pleasure.
I’ve been studying all this stuff about King Ludwig of Bavaria…
Liquitex: The mad king.
KL: Yes. Those gorgeous interiors that almost bankrupted the country. Now they’re tourist attractions that have made that country more money than he (King Ludwig) could have ever imagined. So, I’ve been, like, kind of making these thick and overdone surfaces, quoting that architecture and style. Making the work kind of cute and poisonous at the same time. Everything’s gotta be a double edge sword and you’ve gotta kind of walk that line and never really be totally comfortable with what you’re making.
Liquitex: So, you’re doing post-modern rococo.
KL: I don’t know (laughing). I like to think of it in terms of baroque. I’m very interested in the decorative and in flourishes. But I honestly love it at the same time I want to make critique of it. It’s a way of saying that everything has a cost.
Liquitex: Earlier, you mentioned digital imagery. So there’s obviously some technological influence to your work. How does technology feed what you’re doing?
KL: When I was an undergraduate, I spent a lot of time with close friends who are engineers. I learned how to computer program and then about object orientated programming.
Liquitex: So, what you are doing is visual object oriented programming?
KL: Uh huh. It’s a different kind of organization but it’s the same way of thinking.
Liquitex: Do you see or recognize a connection between scientific thought and the art that you’re making?
KL: Definitely. I don’t think I’ve really worked it out yet though. One of my best friends is studying to be a doctor, and we used to sit around and play with her molecules. Her models. And it was just the greatest thing. I love chemistry and biology.
Liquitex: Organic chemistry is an artists’ science. It’s about visualizing molecules in 3-dimensions and what they’re going to do when they come in close proximity, when they start dancing. It’s very sculptural.
KL: They also trade. Molecules trade little parts of themselves, which I love. It’s such a gift, having a liberal arts education, isn’t it? There’s actually a class here (at RISD) right now and they’re talking about using scientific systems to make artwork, like using the Big Bang Theory or that kind of thing.
Liquitex: That said, your work seems to be influenced more by digital technology and media than by other sciences.
KL: True. Photography, computers, and TV. It’s interesting working from photographs taken of a TV image. They’re a mess, so it’s like transmission lost in transmission. Everything slips, so I think of this medium as a way of articulating slippage and how things get transmitted and nuances get lost. I guess that’s where I’m interested in going.
Liquitex: Talk us through your process, how you start, and how the forms evolve.
KL: Well, the paint is poured onto a Plexiglas surface with a mold release sprayed onto it. I work on a drafting table, but you can see that they’re (She points to the newly poured films that she’s done for our visit) sliding downward cause of the floors. I was originally working in Boston and no floor is straight in Boston. The same is true with Providence, so it actually creates this kind of distended zebra effect, which, you know, you can’t get just from having everything perfectly level.
For pouring and spreading the color, I prefer the plexi over real glass, which I kept breaking. With plexi sheets, before the dried film is peeled off, you can kind of toss them around, lean them up against the wall, and hold them up against stuff you want to put them on. It’s pretty great.
Liquitex: What about the colors?
KL: I mix paint in large quantities. You can see that I mix a range of colors (pointing to a huge number of squeeze bottles in the corner), so I’ll mix a series of matched color adding a little bit of color up, a little bit of white, a little bit of the full range, kind of like you were doing a color chart to make sure you get all the half-steps. So, a lot of these are actually built around a spectrum.
Liquitex: Any particular spectral range?
KL: I started mixing in series because I’m interested in digital manipulation and how, as you look closer and closer, the image falls apart into pixels. I guess that’s where the circle form of the poured color comes in. Cause when you look through a lens and lose focus, you gets these circles of confusion. And naturally, this kind of medium gives itself over to pouring circles.
Liquitex: So now that these have been poured, how long will it take for them to fully dry so you can peel?
KL: Two days, three days, a week. It depends on how thick it is, the temperature, and the humidity. And never, ever, ever put water in it. (laughing)…
Liquitex: We’ve been trying to get people to understand that for years. How did you come to that conclusion?
KL: It messes with the polymer. It just doesn’t work. When I started with acrylics all I did was mix with water, and I would do glazing with water and it started cracking and I was miserable. A lot of my early paintings were acrylic but they were glazed with different layers of color that just started falling apart.
Liquitex: Where’s the balance point between accident and control? At what point do you feel like you’ve got to exercise absolute control over how you are building the image and when do you just turn it loose, letting the color find its own way and trust that whatever it does is going to be right?
KL: I think it has to do with planning the color system and making sure that those are right. If you get the color spectrum right, you can lay in different colors and they fit with their relatives on the surface. Beyond that, it’s just constantly editing, like if this slips too far (indicates the pools of still wet and sliding colors on the drawing table), then the table or the plexi sheet has to be moved to get things back in order. But then, there are accidents that are perfect somehow, so they’ve got to stay.
Liquitex: So the accidents works once you’ve established the color families and the parameters that you’ve set? That’s the process that sets the stage for everything you’re going to do?
KL: Exactly. I’ve always trusted my eye and (my sense of) color. It’s funny because my father’s color blind so I’m always explaining color to him. I pick his ties for him. I did a total report about him last year. I photographed all of his ties on the rack and how different they were and how much trouble he has choosing them. It’s very weird when you can’t see color.
Liquitex: Does he enjoy your work? Does he get it?
KL: Yeah, he totally does. My mother too, they’ve become converts. For a long time they were like, “we don’t know if you can do that…”
Liquitex: It helps, I’m sure, that there’s some very funny stuff in your artwork, as well. It’s hard not to notice that there’s a rubber chicken over there (in the corner of the studio) and then a classically painted gouache painting of the same chicken…
KL: Totally. I was investigating humor for a really long time. I made acrylic whoopie cushions and fake vomit and all this plastic toy stuff. In fact, over here by the door is my big, poured acrylic fake vomit piece. It’s extremely friendly. I mean, if you really like this stuff, if you really like fake vomit, you need to make your own and you can do it with acrylic!
Liquitex: Now, there’s a testimonial that none of us expected.
KL: See, I wasn’t sure whether it was funny or not. I was just making these silly little drawings with pig noses and fake rabbits, and then I was doing these really sincere little paintings of weddings cakes and little people dressed up as bunny rabbits.
Liquitex: Trust us, it’s funny. So, moving to the other end of the funny-serious spectrum, what do you see as the most important role of the artist in the community and culture?
KL: Making things is the most vital thing you can do. That, and being constantly aware of what’s around you. Communicating about how important it is to stay human and just sort of stay rough and raw. That’s a big thing for me. I don’t think anything should be ‘verboten,’ however horrible it is. Images are like a way to share, regardless of how troubling the area.
Liquitex: So why do that with paint rather than photography?
KL: In fact, one of the reasons I’m fascinated with cameras is because my grandfather made lenses for Carl Zeiss. We think my grandfather actually made one that went to the moon. Anyway, there’s something really weirdly academic about painting. Something about being able to work it over and over, and have to sit with something for three weeks and, like, deal with it and wrestle with it and fail miserably or, once in a while, maybe even succeed. Painting is like a filtration system; it’s how you process what you’re seeing around you.
Liquitex: When we interviewed Jamie Bollenbach in Washington (a month earlier), he was just as adamant about point, saying that, by having to go through the process, by working through the sensual and tactile process with the materials, it forces you to deal with the conceptual element or the expressive element in a way that you can’t do unless you have that physical and sensual dialogue.
KL: I definitely agree.
Liquitex: So what’s the most fun for you? What are you enjoying the most?
KL: You know, I like working in, like, 10 different places and on 10 different things at once. But it’s really, really hard being in grad school. They ask you a lot of questions about what you honestly believe in. That’s not always fun but it’s always good. And then you wonder why nobody else asks questions like that outside of school? I mean, I wonder what kind of questions the market asks.
Liquitex: What are the biggest challenges for you?
KL: Not trivializing anything that I want to do.
Liquitex: That’d be really easy to do with this work. There’s a really fine line here, isn’t there?
KL: Yes, but I hope that my work – both the funny and the sincere parts – reflect our culture. It’s kind of like dropping a culture bomb. Part of that is the humor and also the sardonic plastic perfection of the object. So, at the same time that it’s funny, I want it to be like this very weighted down thing that’s got all these connotations reflecting why we are where we are in the world. That’s something that I really feel like I could mine for the rest of my life.
Liquitex: Is there anything that you wish paint would do for you that it’s not doing?
KL: I don’t know. It’s just so nice not to have to work with stuff that’s really toxic. I was doing thick oil paintings for a really long time and I was just really happy to discover acrylic. It blew everything wide open.
