Two Coats Resident Artist Kirstin Lamb, October 12–16, 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In October, Two Coats of Paint welcomes Kirstin Lamb from Providence, Rhode Island. She has taught at Brown University and Clark University and is currently a visiting faculty member at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Working in an old textile mill in nearby Pawtucket, Lamb makes labor-intensive paintings built from fields of adjacent and overlapping marks – dots, stitches, pixels. The technique is something like Georges Seurat’s pointillism crossed with Chuck Close’s portrait grids. But whereas Seurat and Close divided observed light into packets of color, Lamb draws photographic source material, including wallpaper, fabrics, and images of forests. She painstakingly transfers these images, first digitizing them into grids on the computer, then translating the studies onto the painting surface, mixing and applying the paint by hand. Lamb’s probing inventiveness prompted Elizabeth Michelman, writing in Artscope, to extol the artist’s “campaign against rumors of the Death of Painting.”

For her most recent body of work, Lamb photographed young deciduous forests during frequent walks in the woods. She abstracted and blurred the images so that the final paintings hover between focused photorealism, computer-generated pattern, and the rigorous repetition of tiny marks. At a distance, the whole resolves into a coherent image, enabling viewers to see the forest for the trees, as it were. Lamb sees the paintings chronicles of North America’s woodlands, channeling the tradition of panoramic scenic wallpaper, like the wallcoverings once made by Zuber et Cie that turned distant landscapes into domestic backdrops. She compares her slow, time-consuming process to the arduous growth of the forest itself.

In addition to her forest paintings, Lamb paints still lifes and interior scenes. Her Pawtucket studio, she tells me, is full of props – ribbons, fabric, taxidermy, vintage photographs, skulls, paper ephemera – which she organizes and stages into compositions that sometimes include her own paintings, as earlier painters did. Matisse’s The Red Studio comes to mind. Paintings, she understands, can remain fresh through a process that makes curation the subject as well. 

She has also made a series of embroidery-like paintings that establish a one-to-one relationship between a brush mark and a stitch on a needlepoint canvas. They remind me favorably of the drawings Anni Albers made as studies for her abstract weavings, which correlated marks with the interaction of warp and weft and, when I saw them at MoMA a few years ago, hit home as trailblazing Western abstractions. 

Another recent series of Lamb’s draws on French wall decoration made in the wake of the excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum. She worked from cropped documentation that traces the shift in color and pattern occasioned by the unearthing of the frescoes. She writes: “I transfer the documentation to a deliberately cropped and somewhat modern space that reads as both woven and pixelated, primarily to reframe our gaze as contemporary” while “echoing of the darker uses of antiquity.” In that light, the death of painting seems very remote indeed.

Bio: Kirstin Lamb earned her undergraduate degree at Brown University and completed a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, before receiving her MFA from RISD in 2004. She has exhibited at the Wassaic Project in Amenia, NY; Sarah Crown Gallery in Tribeca, New York; Geary in Millerton, NY; the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York; and the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA. Her work is in the collections of Fidelity Investments, Boston; the Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA; and Providence College, Providence, RI, among others. She is represented by Gallery NAGA in Boston and Dirkse/Prim Gallery in Seattle.

Kirstin Lamb, Two Coats of Paint Artist Residency, 22-19 41st Avenue, 6th Floor, Studio #10, Long Island City, NY. Monday, October 12–Friday, October 16. Follow Kirstin on Instagram at @kirstin.lamb

Open Studio: Wednesday, October 14, 5–7 pm. Two Coats of Paint, 22-19 41st Avenue, 6th Floor, Studio #10, Long Island City, NY. For more information or to schedule an individual visit, email staff@twocoatsofpaint.com with STUDIO VISIT in the subject line.

On view:
“Fabrications,” Garvey Simon, Artisan Lofts, 143 Reade Street, New York, NY. Through October 25

Upcoming Exhibitions:
2027: Solo show at Dirkse/Prim Gallery, Seattle, WA
2028: Solo show at Gallery NAGA, Boston, MA

About the Author: Sharon Butler is a painter, the publisher of Two Coats of Paint, and director of the Two Coats of Paint Residency Program.