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A well sharpened pencil with good color saturation

A well sharpened pencil with good color saturation and sufficient hardness can mix both a very light color by pressing very lightly while you can also make medium to dark colors by pressing harder and going over your color several times. The white of the paper is in fact your fourth “color”. When you press lightly you see a lot of the white of the paper and the color you see is very light. When you want to create a darker color you press harder and layer your color to hide the white of the paper (subtractive color). You can obtain even darker colors still by pressing hard while layering with all three colors. Indeed, making the very darkest colors requires a bit of elbow grease!

Here is another study I made using just my three carefully chosen colored pencils.

#colormix #relativecolor
#relativityofcolor #rosylamb

This past year I have been working with a new idea

This past year I have been working with a new idea for transforming color theory into a hands on color mixing practice for artists of all ages. I have been starting to create a series of exercises for children and adults to discover the endless world of colors and values (shades) using just three carefully selected colored pencils. The idea is that when we mix our own colors we become more sensitive to perceiving color and color harmonies.

Here is a study I made using the three primary colored pencils I find work the best for mixing a wide variety of colors and shades.

@rosylamb @colortheory @colorpractice @josef.albers @albers_foundation

My daughter Meena’s photo of a window at Golden

My daughter Meena’s photo of a window at Golden Bridge Pottery.

#goldenbridgepottery

After two weeks of trying to find the right kind o

After two weeks of trying to find the right kind of plaster for mould making here in Pondicherry, India, I finally changed my question from « where can I find plaster for casting sculpture?” to « where can I find plaster for casting temple idols? ». I tried several plasters and I looked in the streets and online but I could not find the strong plaster I need for mould making. Finally I wrote to Adil Writer, a ceramicist in the area and he told me to speak to Krishnamoorthi who buys his materials. Krishnamoorthy told me “go to the place near the yellow house on the main highway”. In the end Govinder, the man who takes care of buying materials for Golden Bridge Pottery, spoke to Krishnamoorthi in Tamil to get the directions and then went to the place near the yellow house to buy me this 25 kilo unmarked sack of locally made plaster. It cost only 200 rupees (about 2.5 euros) and it’s perfect!

@goldenbridgepottery @adilwriter @rosylamb

It’s so lovely to be working here. @goldenbridg

It’s so lovely to be working here.

@goldenbridgepottery @rosylamb

Today is my first day setting up in the studio spa

Today is my first day setting up in the studio space I will be using for the next five months at Golden Bridge Pottery in Pondicherry, India. This is the view from my window.

Golden Bridge was started 50 years ago by two American born artists who are still here working, Ray Meeker and Deborah Smith. Ray built the studio I am working in with unbaked bricks and then fired the entire building. It is a beautiful structure. I’ll be focusing on sculpture while learning all that I can from resident artist and teacher Aarti Manik

@aartimanik. @goldenbridgepottery @rosy.lamb

While sitting with the subject of this portrait I

While sitting with the subject of this portrait I never lowered my mask. I enjoyed the feeling of myself being invisible in my corner. We spent our sessions listening to loud classical music on the radio. He was a willing participant in making the painting, happy to model as much and as long as I wanted him to, but his head was often in very different positions from one moment to the next and I would lean and tilt my own head to try to see the view of him I was building in the painting. Thus the painting is a cobbling together of all the moods and positions of my subject, of the light and colors I see on the wall behind him on sunny afternoons and cloudy mornings, of the changing pile of papers on his desk and in the bookshelf behind him. Photographs have made us all so used to images of ourselves which we can control. An image which arises between two people looking at one another, one painting and the other holding still, defies this control. It truly is a matter of doing the best that you each can in your respective roles, within a limited space of time. As I came near to finishing the painting my stress grew because I worried that he and his family would end up not liking the painting. This Sunday, when my subject's wife came to look at the finished painting my worries flew away as she said, “voila mon vieux” (there’s my old man).

#portraitpainting #rosylamb

After a long night of making molds new life greets

After a long night of making molds new life greets me in the studio this morning.

Registration is now open for a painting workshop w

Registration is now open for a painting workshop with me this summer at Penland School of Craft, North Carolina, USA

Drawing & Painting Summer Session , July 31–August 12

Rosy Lamb
Painting What You See

This oil painting workshop will be a journey into the unknown waters of our visual perception. We’ll work with models and still lifes with the intent of seeing the world as interlocking planes of light, color, line, and shadow rather than separate and nameable subjects. In the first half of the workshop, we’ll mix a limited palette and explore multiple approaches to starting a painting. In the second half, we’ll spend longer sessions working from one point of view. We’ll allow our work to evolve freely without fear of repainting or starting over. Come ready to paint, play, and exchange impressions of what we see together. All levels.

To sign up and/or to check out all the other amazing workshops happening at Penland this summer go to the link in the bio above.

Happy on the Shelf, oil on plaster, 20 x 24 inches

An amazing light on my old friend Fred this aftern

An amazing light on my old friend Fred this afternoon...

This morning I found this note I wrote to myself w

This morning I found this note I wrote to myself while working on the above painting.

REMEMBER WHAT PAINTING IS
The exact and real connection
RELATIONSHIP
DIRECTNESS
NO THINKING, “NO. It cannot be, I will try my way”

STOP PRETENDING AND PRETENDING
AND PRETENDING

A VERY TINY MOMENT OF TRUTH
IS BIGGER THAN ANY AMOUNT OF
EFFORT WHEN I AM PRETENDING

that is not what I meant at all, huile sur plâtre, 48x41, 2019

#rosylamb

I had decided not to write about the theft in my e

I had decided not to write about the theft in my exhibit last June anymore, to turn my attention toward showing you some of the works that were in the show as there are many that I have never posted here. But last Friday a few coincidental events inspired me to tell you a little story about this painting which was itself not stolen but still does have a poetical connection to both the robbery, to two friends, to the beautiful patterns that weave through our relationships with each other, with time.

I had lunch with a friend from London on Friday and I told him that the gift I had made for him, the ceramic teapot in this painting, was stolen during my show. This painting, though as I mentioned above was not itself stolen, was hanging in the downstairs gallery just to the right of a painting which was stolen. This makes me think the thief perhaps had time to recognise the teapot they found in a closet upstairs as the one in this painting? I wonder even if this painting worked as an advertisement for the little teapot in the mind of my thief?

Later on Friday afternoon another friend passing through Paris (from Philadelphia) stopped by the studio and I realised that one of the sculptures you see in this same painting (the middle one), is a portrait I made of that friend from Philadelphia some 20 odd years ago when I was still in art school. In one day I had met two people who I rarely see and who live on separate continents and yet have each their own unique connection to this same painting,

I find the more I pay attention the more I notice the synchronicities which wind their way through our every moment in the circular patterns of our friendships, our creative work, even in the perverse intuition that led me to name this painting “We listen to Sherlock Holmes” just one day before my show opened and one day before this painting would transform into a painting containing a stolen object and a clue to a mysterious crime.

We listen to Sherlock Holmes, oil and charcoal on paper mounted on plaster, 66 x 51 cm, 2020

A few more pics of pottery..somehow the multiple p

A few more pics of pottery..somehow the multiple photo thing didn’t seem to work on the previous post.

After two years of not seeing my family these past

After two years of not seeing my family these past two months in my hometown in NH, USA have been full to the brim. There was no time to paint, to write emails, to post on instagram..somehow though between the visiting and the dishes and the laundry I did manage to make a little lopsided pottery. Now it is time to pack our bags and get back to the calm and quiet of city life..vive la rentrée!

Here are a few of the things that came hot out of the kiln this morning..

A story of stolen paintings and broken hearts (con

A story of stolen paintings and broken hearts (continued)

This painted sketch of the French playwright Sébastien Thierry was also stolen in break in the night after my opening. I painted it one sunny morning at the end of February 2020, a few weeks before the first confinement took us all by surprise. Sébastien lay on a mattress on the floor of my studio for a few hours, surrounded by my paintings.

It is curious that two of the four paintings that were stolen were of well known authors. Sébastien Thierry’s plays are brilliant, funny, insane..Was the thief interested in these specific paintings because of their subjects? Or was it simply a matter of convenience as the five stolen works all fitted so well into my large backpack (also stolen)?

#rosylamb #sébastienthierry #stolenpainting

a story of stolen paintings and broken hearts (con

a story of stolen paintings and broken hearts (continued)

As a child growing up in a family of artists in the woods of New Hampshire (where I return every summer), I learned from an early age about making art but nothing about engaging with the world of other people, other points of view. We homeschooled, we read books, some of us played the piano (not me), and we invented our own board games. We thought about great artists of the past. When I was eight or nine my mother put half a loaf of bread in front of me and showed me how to look at the negative space around it and I began to draw from life. The tacit rule of our family seemed to be, make anything you want but keep it for yourself, don’t ask for attention from the uncomprehending world or you will lose your place in paradise.

But every time I do an exhibit, I breach this family rule. For two weeks in Paris this June, years of my work were dangerously noticeable, public objects, for sale no less! In one fell swoop they became desirable to a thief!
When you come into the light, however briefly, anything can happen, all forms of notice, from beautiful compliments to disinterest to frightening violations in word or deed. But what would any of us do without the chance to jump through these rings of fire?

Today is the day I was born. This small unique bronze sculpture is called “Borne” and it was also chosen by the thief on the night of the robbery.

#rosylamb #stolensculpture

a story of stolen paintings and broken hearts (con

a story of stolen paintings and broken hearts (continued)

This is another one of the paintings that was stolen in the gallery break-in after the opening. It is a tiny portrait on plaster that I painted fifteen years ago as a gift for a friend. It was done over a few happy sessions in which my friend Michel and I sat face to face looking at one another in my studio. Michel enjoyed making me uneasy by smiling flirtatiously at me and I enjoyed proving to him that I was not so discomfited by his attention to me as to not be able to paint him. Over the years Michel’s attachment to the painting, to those moments we had spent making it, only grew.

Upon my request, my friend brought this painting to the gallery on the night of the opening and one of my assistants put it into our storage area. I was planning to show it the following week as part of a temporary exhibit of portraits of writers in connection with the author reading and causerie “Where Everything Begins, Kilometre Zero”. Within hours the little portrait was gone forever. I did not have a chance to lay eyes on it even once.

Is the thief now sitting in their kitchen staring deep into the eyes of Michel, as I did fifteen year back?

I will paint a new portrait of Michel in September when I am back in Paris. It will be, necessarily, something new, representing someone older.

#rosylamb #stolenpainting #micheljanneau

a story of stolen paintings and broken hearts I p

a story of stolen paintings and broken hearts

I posted this small painting of the author Marie Darieuseque on the day I painted it on May 29th. The painting was not three weeks old when it was stolen on June 15th the night after the opening of my show (a locked door was forced open). Three other paintings, a bronze sculpture, a ceramic vase, a hammer and a big backpack were also stolen. The police were perplexed, they told me contemporary galleries are never broken into with the intention of stealing the art.

What the police don’t know is that lately I have been a magnet for theft. This was the fifth time in ten months that I have been robbed of something or other. But the gallery break-in was the most heart-breaking of these intrusions, since artworks really are not objects at all, they are markers of spirit and of connection. My sense of joy in finally being able to share my paintings with anyone who might care to come to see them prompted a person that somehow felt, in that very instant, angry, left out, invisible, to steal them from me. Instead of connection, there was proof of a violent disconnect, of the multiple and unequal realms of perception in which we all try to live together.

I will continue this story tomorrow, as well as share images of the other stolen works, in case you happen to see one of these works online or for sale somewhere.

#rosylamb #stolenpainting #mariedarieussecq

The show ended a few days ago but I am only now se

The show ended a few days ago but I am only now seeing photos from the opening. This is my daughter Meena (center) and her friends who welcomed people at the door..

#rosylamb.com

This painting is of my twin nieces Molly and Willa

This painting is of my twin nieces Molly and Willa.

M&W, oil on plaster, 44x44, 2019

Over and Under the Ocean
Exposition du 15 -30 juin
Pavillon Rive Gauche
6 Rue Frédéric Sauton, Paris 5e.

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