Yesterday, while on a lunch break from cast drawing, I decided to hike on over to the Spanierman art gallery to check out the Sarah Lamb exhibit. Ms. Lamb is unabashedly and unapologetically primarily a painter of objects. Very often my students will ask me how one goes about becoming a famous artist.(parenthetically; "Mr.Sullivan why aren't you famous? To which I reply " I still have both of my ears.") I tell them that there are generally three ways; Do something that has never been done before, have amazing technical facility. or make something old look new again. Sarah falls into the latter category. Theres something very Goya-esque about her paintings. She obviously reveres Chardin (as do I). Yet she has a way of making images that seem fresh and very much of the moment and this particular time.
        I'm sure she won't be reviewed in any of the major newspapers. I'm not much for conspiracy theories but there seems to be a definite bias against anything having to do with Classical realism. Lately I've been catching the art critics dropping snide remarks when reviewing the work of artists they consider au-currant such as Currin and Yuskavage, disparaging the morbid seriousness of those "other" realist painters. In other words, if you really mean it, then you can't really mean it. Your tongue must be firmly planted in your cheek, because, as all the smartest critics know, painting has been dead for a long time. Yet painters such as Ms. Lamb and her mentor Jacob Collins forge on and inspire quite a few artists to do likewise.
      How can this be so? Well let's take a bit of a closer look at Sarah's paintings. At first glance they seem very traditional and laid out in Chardin like arrangements. Then I started to notice that many of her paintings feature a kind of "Raft of Medusa" arrangement with a board (raft) jutting out from the main table (ocean) and the objects centrifically placed from a center of interest. The effect is to take something that seems calm and restful and inject it with Baroque energy. One of her paintings features brown and white eggs arranged contrapuntally around a copper pot. The eggs seem somehow caught in the gravitational pull of the pot and there inherently fragile nature makes for a palpable tension. Another compelling element is her playful use of chiaroscuro. Unlike many of the self anointed master still life painters who have turned the use of chiaroscuro into a formula Ms. Lamb treats the background almost as a living membrane that playfully reveals or envelopes the objects in her paintings. In one of her paintings there is a piece of meat that gradually dissolves into nothing more than a few colorful brushstrokes streaking across the dark ground. Although obviously a painter with natural facility, that facility is never allowed to become the overriding subject of the painting. It is allowed free rein when it is called for such as in the area that's reflected in the large dusty bottle.
     What makes painters of still lifes such as Lamb and Collins and Jeffrey Larson and Andrea Smith relevant to our own time? Because times have changed. These artists reflect the times in which they live by making paintings that are honest and hard won. Theres a reason that many artists have sought to bring back traditional subject matter and technicques. People weren't populating cast drawing halls in the 1950's. Their choice of subject matter is just as reflective of our twenty first century culture as those post-post modernists who tend to get more press. Goya could not have been Goya in any other time than his own. Same goes for Manet, yet Manet was greatly influenced by Goya. Whiny, wear your heart on your sleeve artists will never approach the deeper truths inherent in the work of great artists because truly great artists don't have to hit us over the head with meaning. They are sensitive creatures, tuned in to the world around them, inquisitive, curious to understand how things work, we need them to show us how things have changed and how things have stayed the same. That's accomplished just by being themselves; life reflected through their own sensibility. What more do you need to be relevant? What more would you want?