Thanks for agreeing to do this, Kirstin. You are a multi-faceted artist who works in many media. Can you please give us an overview of your palette (as it were!)?
Hi there! Thanks for asking! I’m a painter who works in acrylic and acrylic gouache. I work in a studio in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Like many of the studios in Rhode Island, it is a former textile mill, and that has come to inspire my paintings.
I have two or three different bodies of work, which I work on simultaneously. I will give you a brief description and also attach my artist statement if you would like to use that as well.
I am currently working on a series of paintings of the woods, to be shown this September in Boston on Newbury Street at Gallery NAGA. I am super excited to share this work there as I think it is my brief study in Boston that enabled this work. I spent time in the MFA while I was a post-bac student at the SMFA, and it changed how I looked at Impressionism and American Landscape Tradition paintings. The paintings are made from photographs I take while walking in the woods. I make a digital pattern from the photographs and then paint the gridded pattern using loaded daubs of tiny dots in acrylic. These look like tapestries, cross stitch, hopefully impressionist marks and photorealist works.
I also have a body of work that consists of paintings of paintings, mostly images of my studio, sometimes images of shows I have curated or speculative dreamy image combinations. This stemmed from a desire to create a dialogue between images, to make a sentence structure between images within one painting. I frequently set out to talk about something simple, like a drawing or painting assignment I gave while teaching, and then the wall of objects I stage to paint gets wider and wider. This project is also rendered in acrylic, but the line is more drawing forward / sometimes leaning a bit toward graphic or cartoon.
And finally, I have a body of work that is a hybrid of cross-stitch and digital drawing, which I print and paint over. I call the series Remix, as it functions as a hybrid of many of the different types of work I have made over the years. Here, I am really interested in how the intersecting marks and imagery can become new things, new types of paint strokes. I also like the idea of using digital technology to create a map that I then completely overpaint.
Your studio is in Providence. You work and sell your works there, correct?
My studio is in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in a fabulous mill building on Fountain Street. I feel really grateful to have such a wonderful home for my work. It is right off 95 and home to many other wonderful Rhode Island artists. I do not sell directly from my studio, I work with Gallery NAGA in Boston, which represents my work, and other galleries by agreement. I run all my sales through galleries and arts organizations as I feel they best represent and support artists. It feels good to have a home and space for me and my work in a gallery I trust. I want that for every artist.
Other galleries sell your work as well, correct?
I currently have my work up for a few more days in a show in Hyde Park, New Jersey! The show is at a gallery called B. Beamesderfer Gallery, it is supported by an extraordinary frame shop that does all of its craft work in-house. Really a treasure! I also have work up at the WaterFire Arts Center in a big survey show called “Growing the Networks,” which has been super fun. That show shares the work of a range of artists across Rhode Island by nomination. It is special to be showing with so many friends and mentors!
In addition to my solo show at Gallery NAGA in September, I will also be showing my work in a wonderful group show on Long Island at the Lyceum Gallery at Suffolk County Community College. The show titled “The Show of Delights” is full of artists I admire and am thrilled to show alongside.
Tell us what first inspired you to become an artist.
I had the good fortune of having a great babysitter from the house next door! She drew for me and I was captivated. At the time, I asked for all the cartoons, rabbits, ducks, etc. She was so much fun for me, I just watched her draw. I must have been 3 or 4 at the most. I have no recollection of a time when I wasn’t drawing. I’m grateful that that has always been a part of my life, it helps me. As a young kid I used to make drawings to introduce myself, to make friends.
And the journey you took getting to today, including where you grew up and your education.
I grew up in a suburb of New York, Summit, NJ. My dad’s family has lived there for a while and my folks still live there, which is a wonderful thing. I think of Rhode Island much like I think of New Jersey. Dense, with good beaches and many artists, near cities but not too citified.
I have had the great good fortune to go to many wonderful schools, and then also work at many wonderful schools. I did my undergraduate studies at Brown University, studying Visual Art and Literature in English. I couldn’t keep myself away from the painting studio; that was how I knew I had to continue to paint. It was a devotion. Then I went to a year of post-baccalaureate study at the Museum School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (the SMFA). That school is really a wonderful introduction to the Boston arts community and a space that allows you open access to the museum, a special privilege. I found that my work thrives in relation to museum spaces; I take inspiration and questions away each time. Then my final studies were completed at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) where I did my MFA in Painting, a competitive and intense program that I am really grateful to have completed. It was intense and exhausting while I was in the program, but the level of discourse and the quality of work produced were phenomenal then as now.
Do you teach now?
I teach adjunct on a class-by-class basis. I have been working at Clark University in Worcester for the past couple of years. I enjoy their inquisitive, empathetic and bright students. I have had the good fortune to teach a range of remarkable students at a handful of Rhode Island schools including Providence College, Brown, RISD, and Salve Regina. Each class is a special community and I am grateful to my students for teaching me so much about art making as well.
What advice would you give young artists?
Keep making regardless of what goes on around you. I think it is easy to despair that you are doing the wrong thing if you are not focusing on what you are doing to the exclusion of market, family and peer pressure. And build skills in a range of areas. My skills that came in handy were desk job-related, but yours could be different.
What’s on the horizon for Kirstin Lamb?
I hate to keep telling you about it, but I am really excited about my show at Gallery NAGA with an opening celebration on September 6 from 1-3 p.m. Sophia Ainslie is also opening her wonderful show and I’m excited to be showing in the gallery next to her! This is the first time I have a catalog to share, so this opening will be something of a catalog release party. I will be sharing signed catalogs with those who come to the opening! The show runs from September 2nd to September 27th if you cannot make the opening. A visit to Newbury Street in early fall is always fun! Here is a link to the gallery page for the show.
Immediately after I open the show with Gallery NAGA, I’m headed up to Pouch Cove, Newfoundland, to join a cohort of artists in residence at the Pouch Cove Artist Residency. I will be there for the rest of the month making artwork and studying the landscape! Happy to get to see new places and study different coastal woods in North America!
Thank you so much for your lovely questions!
I make labor intensive paintings of gridded dots. These paintings frequently document fabric, wallpaper and photo-based source material. My most recent body of work has turned to the woods as its lone subject and focus.
My woods paintings image spaces that I have walked through on foot. The works are made from digital patterns I make from photographs, which I then paint on a wet media acetate. The patterns are derived from the photographs, but also abstract and blur the photograph to a greater or lesser degree, depending upon scale and complexity of the image. I like to consider my work as a contemporary way of documenting our extraordinary woodland spaces of North America, in the tradition of panoramic and scenic wallpaper.
I’m looking for a painting whose marks land between textile stitch, Impressionist mark and digital pixel. Much of what I do is mix and organize color. There is high labor behind each work, yet the effect is immediate and present. The paintings blur between a focused Photorealism, a computer-generated pattern and a fetishized repetition of an acrylic paint mark.
I want the experience of my paintings to be much like walking in the woods. Surrounded by a fabric of green, an excess of detail, the labor of making the painting stands as a devotional homage to the complexity and slow growth of the forest. The painting space both slows you down to a single greenspace and holds you within many particular and singular snapshots in time.
I hope to image the woods in its current state, as it exists now, near me. We have precious resources in both humble scrub brush or elegant old growth forests, all worth documenting as they are seen in our moment.
Editor’s note: This interview was conducted by email
Copyright © 2025 Salve Regina University. Originally published by OceanStateStories.org.
