Dr. Sam Lam Art

New Painting #3 in My Home by Dr. Sam Lam

This painting was created on raw, ungessoed canvas using thinned down, single layered watercolor paint.  I was inspired by the artist Morris Louis who created similar media pieces.  In fact, a few years ago I was in Washington D.C. and was at the Hirshhorn Museum and saw that they were opening a Morris Louis exhibit.  Unfortunately, it had not opened yet, and I was sneaking a peek through semi-occluded and roped off areas but was mesmerized.  There was an adjacent gallery that had other painters working in this medium, and I was able to get within inches staring at the beauty of the bled-through paint on the burlap canvas.  This painting is a much softer work for me that conveys both the rigid geometry of which I am fond and also a very serious degree of painterliness that I now enjoy.  The bleeding of the paint into the unprimed canvas provides a very raw and finished feel at the same time.  I chose these colors to transmit a sense of tranquility that is more feminine offset by the more yang-like geometry.  The brushed silver frame and the background eggplant colored wall really make this piece sing.  For those elements, I give full credit to my interior designer who picked them for me.

New Painting #2 in My Home by Dr. Sam Lam

I love this painting.  I did it a few years ago and had it in one of my work spaces until I realized it would truly work better at home.  I started with a very strong, bright firehouse red paint to cover this canvas that measure 4′ x 6′ in dimensions.  I was inspired by one of my favorite painters, Agnes Martin, who paints for those who do not know in squares and works with lines that fill up her squares.  I have always been enchanted with multimedia elements so I used oil pastels to create the lines that arc across the canvas.  As I mentioned in painting #1 for my home, I am trying to combine painterliness with rigidity.  The pastels afford me that expression by creating an almost crumbly feel to the surface that looks child-like but remains imposing due to the rigid linearity of the construct.  I like the fact that the painting works with primary colors of red, blue, and yellow but has an added complexity by virtue of the use of gold and silver oil pastels that bisect each of the yellow and blue lines, respectively.  I paired the yellow and the gold and the blue and silver to keep things that are somewhat tone on tone in feel. As I have mentioned in describing my other paintings, I love the use of metallics to create a more complex piece while remaining more constrained in my color palette.  The painting is framed over by a thick acrylic box for both visual appeal but also practical necessity as the oil pastel is very easily smeared even with a gentle touch of the finger.  Also, I would love to give credit to my interior designer Roger for picking the dark brown accent walls that offset my painting tremendously well and contrasts amazingly with the white furniture that you see hinted at along the periphery of the photo.

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.

Mass MOCA Photograph by Dr. Sam Lam

This photograph was chosen by Mass MOCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) for their website on Sol Lewitt (my favorite artist).  I photographed my niece’s black and gray stockinged foot next to Lewitt’s painting of the same color combination.  This was part of a trip through upstate New York and into western Mass. for my mom’s 70th birthday recently.

Photograph of Paris Guidebook by Dr. Sam Lam

This may not be one of my best photos that I have taken but somehow it was chosen for inclusion in a recent Paris guidebook so therefore I am proud of it.  The photograph is of the Musee Carnavalet, Le Marais, Paris.  I hope I get more photos published.  I have a photo of two dueling turtles from the Galapagos that got published in the Miami Herald many years ago.  I have to go find that photo!

Kimono-Acrylic on canvas Painting, by Dr Sam Lam
This painting began with a love for Japanese art and culture, hence a Kimono, but also for my passion for modern abstraction.  I worked with all metallic colors that reminded me of a glittery kimono but that also served as a more “neutral” palette that would be less shocking to the eye than say primary red, blue, and yellow.  The central waistband of the Kimono is painted with copper color acrylic paint.  The breast plate is painted using two types of gold paint, and the sleeves are made of stainless steel and silver paint.  The skirt is anchored with a more neutral bone black color.  This painting hangs between floors 1 and 2 of my building as a gateway to the second floor. It is created as an intersection of three adjoining canvases.

Kimono-Acrylic on canvas, 96 x 96″

Bearded Fireworm underwater photo taken by Dr Samuel Lam in Bonaire.

This photo was taken in the good old days with 35 mm print film using Fuji Velvia with 50 speed film close up at night near the shore underwater.  The fireworm was crawling across one of the large columns that held up a large shoreline plank walkway.  The juxtaposition of the red was so wonderful against the red encrusted column that I knew that it would be a fascinating shot.  All of these underwater photographs were taken pure with no cropping and with no post-production digital manipulation.

“Amsterdam”-Acrylic on canvas “paired” by Dr. Sam Lam

Despite my trip to Amsterdam this year (2009) for a course, this painting was done a long time ago at the conception of my building.  It hangs prominently at the front office reception because I love it so very much.  I love the two shades of blue color that are inverted.  I somehow really like to hang two paintings next to each other as a visual pair.  To me, it is a far richer experience than a single canvas can convey.  I create all of my works on Adobe Illustrator first as my way of sketching before I actually commit paintbrush to canvas.  The precision of the lines you see were done with taping/masking with bleed throughs controlled by painting the background color down first to seal in the color so that second color does not pass under the tape.  This is very akin to my favorite artist Sol Lewitt’s method of working.  The images were projected from a computer then taped off as described above.  I also love the background color which is a beige burlap that really sets off the blue very well.  Like anything in art, it is hard to explain why it works, but it simply does.  Why Amsterdam as a title for this work of art?  Who knows, except they look sort of like flowers, which that city is famous for.  Perhaps not tulips but my own fantastical representation of that city.

Amsterdam-Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36″ paired

Lam Facial Plastics logo by Dr Sam Lam

The accompanying logo on this page is the simplest expression of beauty to me, as it conveys the heightened elegance of what i love. Two, unjoined strokes that that are calligraphic in their sweep and entirely distinct entities. Together, they conveyed abstract beauty and also hint at an “L” for Lam Facial Plastics without over stating it.  Fortunately, this logo design is my all time favorite!

Illustration by Dr Samuel Lam from his book “Complementary Fat Grafting”- Chapter 4

Fortunately, this book required far fewer drawings than my previous ones since it only covered one topic, and I could use the same illustrations with overlays to convey different teaching points.  I started out using only Adobe Illustrator but found that to convey facial volume effectively that Illustrator was simply not equipped to do that well.  Accordingly, I made some investigations and found a program, Corel Painter, paired with a Wacom tablet that allowed me to be entirely liberated as an artist.  Using the Wacom tablet, I could tilt and push the pen like a brush and create over 200 levels of pressure points and different degrees of drag as I moved my pen across the tablet.  I could even use oil (which I did for the face), acrylic (for the hair), and watercolor (for the lips), something that would have been impossible in real life.  Also, as anyone who works on oil can tell you, drying time is terribly long.  With digital oil, I could set the drying time to immediate or return the condition to semi-wet or wet, which is amazing.  I was also able to then blend the features of Corel Painter for softer, artistic renderings with the hard-edged communication advantages of Illustrator.  In short, it was a fun, creative exercise working with digital painting.