On the Lam
D. Dominick Lombardi
Rarely, am I charmed by an artist’s work. It happened in San Antonio, Texas, at the WAX (Writers and Artists Exchange) where hundreds of artists gathered to hear the comments of a dozen visiting critics and editors. Being one of them, I was particularly interested in the question and answer period after we all did our little take on the San Antonio art scene.
Most of the questions revolved around how San Antonio’s thriving cultural scene could expand beyond its geographic territory without leaving the place they loved. Right at the end of the Q & A, a soft spoken, sincere middle aged woman asked if we had seen the exhibition of her 86 year-old mother-in-law, whose work was displayed right there, in the project room at Blue Star Contemporary Arts Center. So, after the talk I made a headed over to this show where I was instantly engaged by the art. The works were colorful, even whimsical abstractions that at first looked like a combination of Stuart Davis and Henri Matisse. They were Wai Ching Lam’s "Hundred and One Nights" series which documented her fractured, yet somehow sequential thoughts through clear, interwoven iconic forms that seemed to dance around the room.
Soon after I entered, I was followed by the spry octogenarian, Ms. Lam, who was more than happy to make sure I saw and experienced each and every work. Ms. Lam, who came to the US from China, fleeing the communist revolution studied science and math at MIT in the 40s, had a long and loyal career to lyrical, even meditative forms which renewed my faith in automatic, poetic painting.
She said she usually began in one corner, say the top left, running down and across the surface of the canvas until her vision was realized. This, she felt, was her working her surfaces from zero to infinity, which I am sure, has all to do with her intense interest in science and math.
Each work, which seemed to have its own particular color theory and line type, ranged in content from children’s toys to traditional sayings. I found one or two compositional factors of particular interest, whereby Ms. Lam used a sort of bull’s-eye form or strategically placed white spaces to hold her vividly colored compositions together. But it is not what she is painting so much as to how she is painting. I kept going back to look at how fresh these works were, painted with honest brush strokes and simple colors. With no modulation in the colors, Ms. Lam relies exclusively on the shapes or edges of the forms to convey movement, mass, weight and strength. Durable forms that hold, even flaunt the colors they bare, remaining as weighty as they are buoyant.
I left the show feeling my own spirit had been lifted, even renewed, with a body of works that revealed a true joy in painting
