(Photo by Dion Ogust)
It’s nice to sit and do nothing,” says Katherine Burger as she’s having her portrait painted at the Woodstock Library. “It’s so meditative. And Claire is very entertaining.”
“I’m telling her my life story,” laughs Claire Lambe, the Irish-born artist who is in the process of painting Woodstock residents for her project “Community.” Each Friday through June, she’ll be painting at the library, and Woodstockers are invited to sign up for a chance at being recorded in paint. “I want to create a picture of Woodstock in 2015,” explains Lambe, “so I need all ages, genders, and ethnicities.”
At the same time, she’ll be using photos to paint residents of Clonmel, her birthplace in Ireland. A joint exhibit of paintings from her two hometowns will be held in Clonmel in August. She notes on her website, “I see the combination of the paintings as being one piece where the sum of all the paintings together make an impact that they cannot make alone, just as a community or a nation is stronger than the individuals that make it up.” Lambe finds it significant that Clonmel, about the size of Kingston, is about the same distance from Dublin as Kingston and Woodstock are from Manhattan.
Anyone interested in sitting for a Woodstock portrait must be willing to sit for at least two to three hours, with breaks every 20 minutes. Exceptions will be made for the very young and the very old who are unable to sit still for long, in which case, Lambe will paint from photos. However, she says there is a quality to painting from life that is missing when a photo is the primary basis for the work.
“A photo gives a frozen quality,” she observes. “A painting from life captures the essence of a moment. You’re not coloring something in. It’s just you and the person you’re painting, the paint, and the brushes.” She will take a photo of each subject to block out the initial structure of the painting at home and put on finishing touches, saving time for the sitters.
Lambe’s work extends to murals, mixed media paintings, and installations, and she writes art criticism for Roll magazine. She teaches portrait painting at the Woodstock School of Art and drew live portraits on the street in Europe as an undergraduate at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin. She was in her early twenties, with a three-year-old daughter, when she went to Rome to meet a well-connected friend who never showed up. “I had to make some money, so I started doing pencil drawings and caricatures of passersby on the Spanish Steps,” she recalls. When that endeavor wasn’t yielding much cash, she took the advice of some boys at the Colosseum and hopped a boat to the island of Sardinia.
“Kids on the ferry took me to their village and became my agents. They brought me to housing estates and to the bank. I drew all the people at the bank, in the vault.” Later, she had success doing street portraits in Greece, where she also learned the art of entertaining her subjects. A batch of memorized nursery rhymes came in handy for getting children to sit relatively still.
More recently, Lambe has created detailed live portraits of actors to publicize plays written and directed by her husband, Carey Harrison. Her first poster for his acting company, the Woodstock Players, featured Harrison himself in the lead role of the magician in Magus. As he sat for the portrait, she remembers, “He kept falling asleep. It worked out well because it made him look sinister.”
The current project has been stirring in Lambe’s mind for two years, since she started monitoring the open studio sessions at the School of Art. “Open studio is not life drawing of a nude model,” she points out. “And it’s what I want to do here, painting people as they are, in whatever they’re wearing.”
Observers are welcome to stop by the library and watch a painting take shape in the corner of the art books section. The books make an appropriate setting and are useful for helping the subject maintain position. “My point of focus is the spine of that Jackson Pollock book,” comments Burger, also an artist, specializing in collage. At the library, Lambe paints in acrylic rather than oils, so there’s no odor.
She cautions that sitters must be prepared for a truthful rendering. Anyone expecting wrinkles to be airbrushed from an aging face will be disappointed. She cited an elderly woman, back in Greece, who was unhappy with her portrait. Lambe’s Greek wasn’t proficient, and she didn’t understand the problem until the woman pointed to the sample self-portrait of the 24-year-old and said, “Like this!”
What Lambe likes best about doing live portraits is the potential for sending the artist “into the zone. Another level of seeing comes into play. You start to see colors that aren’t obvious, reflecting off the ceiling and the clothes, under the skin. Various pulses start to come, and everything goes out of your head. That’s when I know I’m off to the races.”++
Claire Lambe paints portraits, now through June, on Friday afternoons at the Woodstock Library, 5 Library Lane. Prospective subjects may sign up for a portrait session by speaking to a librarian or by contacting Lambe through her website, http://www.clairelambe.net. Some sittings may be held on Saturdays to accommodate people with full-time jobs. In order to obtain a cross-section of characteristics, not all those who apply will be accepted. She’s especially seeking sitters in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, as well as people of non-Caucasian ethnicity.