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.”