This acrylic piece reminiscent of a rugby shirt hangs in the hallway just adjacent to my salon’s entrance.  The canvas size was custom-made for me by Stretch and Frame in Dallas, Texas.  I would highly recommend them to any artist who does not want to stretch his/her own frames, as they are all acid-free, double primed, gallery-wrapped, thick wood frame, hand stretched, and nylon mixed (to keep the stretch), and as stated can be custom designed for you.  You can also specify how you want the gallery wrapping so that depending on how you hang the canvas, the wrap will not be folded over on the sides but on the top and bottom of the canvas to be more invisible.  The gallery wrapping is so beautiful, most of my pieces hang naked without a frame.

I always love the combination of blue and orange.  That just works well.  The use of dark Prussian blue and grays help to anchor this piece and serve as “neutral” elements.  Line width and basic design work were constructed on Adobe Illustrator before committing brush to canvas.  Hope you enjoy!

Rugby Painting by Dr. Sam Lam

This pair of watercolor paintings express rigid geometry, which is softened through the medium of watercolor.  As you can see, the pairing uses inverted areas of color, i.e., the blue canvas uses the primarily convex side to shade in and the pinkish canvas uses the concave portion of the same shape.  This pair sits in the hallway of the clinical skin care side of my spa.

This painting hangs upstairs on the way to the Solberg Center.  It was created by thinning down airbrush paint with water and painting a thin coating of this mixture onto absorbent ground to create the watercolor on canvas feel.  I experimented until I was able to create this unique effect.  I then painted a thick, painterly acrylic square that matched tone on tone for each canvas in this tetraptych.

This colored pen drawing is now split between upstairs in a vacant space and in my spa manager’s office downstairs.  This is the only time I used colored pens to express myself.  The piece is done on cold-pressed watercolor paper.  I think it is a fun piece that emphasizes both color and line.  It is hard to see in this photograph but the lines are a combination of red and orange interspersed.

This painting is situated downstairs in the separate lobby entrance.  It is entitled “Optimism”, as the four bright colors extend outward in four directions may suggest.  The use of grays to act as an inner frame has been matched to each specific color for optimal and optical effect.