New Painting #1 in My Home by Dr. Sam Lam
This painting was done with egg tempura on cold-pressed watercolor paper and stands in the hallway on the way to my bedroom. The piece is pressed and floated between thick, Lucite, acrylic blocks. I wanted to do something on paper that used a much thicker and opaque feel than watercolors after having finished a series of watercolor pieces for my spa (which I will post here shortly). Egg tempura was the perfect medium. In this piece you can see that I blended the feeling of handmade painterliness with the precision of defined geometry. Over the past 2 years I have moved away from rigid geometry in many of my paintings and allowed my hand to be expressed. Given my desire for retaining some geometric order, I still have relatively rigidly defined lines. I like the color combination of violet, brown, and yellow. In short, it just works. I have to give credit though to my interior designer who happened to be at my home as I was working on this piece and suggested the magic brown that I think really makes this piece sing and anchors it by serving as an almost neutral color. Putting the brown color as my central element allows me to make a strong visual anchor that does not make this painting too colorful, something I am always working on is to reduce my color spectrum so that you can appreciate the colors in front of you. Although I love Sol Lewitt as an artist, I find his later works that use the entire rainbow kaleidoscope of colors to be overwhelming (perhaps his intention) than I would otherwise desire for my work. Perhaps I shall change in the coming years, as I already have but this work exemplifies my current thinking on how I design and create my paintings now.
