Cate McQuaid: Ocean in a Drop | KIRSTIN LAMB, LOST IN THE WOODS

May 20, 2025
By Cate McQuid

Kirstin Lamb, Side of the Trail in Rhode Island, 2024, Acrylic and Acrylic Gouache on Duralar, 80” x 60”. Photo Karen Philippi Photography. All photos courtesy Kirstin Lamb.

Kirstin Lamb’s paintings need to be seen in person, not on a computer. They play with how a computer makes an image, and on a screen, they might be mistaken for a pixelated. They’re also firmly based in domestic crafts and Photorealism. And ultimately, they’re paintings, celebrating the obsessive mark making of a human – highly skilled and attentive, yet unpredictable. She has a show coming to Gallery NAGA in September.

Kirstin began breaking familiar images into discrete marks when she was at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts for a post-baccalaureate degree. She made a splashy, abstract version of Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. But her current process comes from her discovery of cross stitch patterns online: itty bitty grids with each cell coded indicating which color thread to use.

Kirstin takes her own photographs and applies the cross stitch pattern, which she prints out to paint on acetate.

The cells are tiny, and some of the paintings are big. This one, Side of the Trail in Rhode Island, is more than six feet tall. Mixing color and applying bitty dab after bitty dab, Kirstin make take a year or two to finish a painting. She’s had to get glasses; this work is hard on the eyes. “I like working to failure and fatigue,” she writes below.

The effect is at once engulfing, familiar, and disconcerting. The painter is curating Thicket, a group show at Overlap Gallery in Newport opening June 7, and it’s easy to see her attraction to getting lost in the weeds – or the woods. Her paintings call to mind the most thickety of Neil Welliver’s Maine forests: there’s an immediacy to the environment that traditional landscapes lack.

That’s partly due to Kirstin’s pointillist approach, but it’s also about her perspective on the forests she walks through – friendly, inquiring, human-sized, open to the breadth of a place rather than trying to tame it or cordon it off. She studies botanical images as she paints; she’s in deep.

From a distance, Kirstin’s paintings look photorealistic. They remind me of autumn-woods wallpaper I had in my bedroom when I was a teenager. But closer in they dissolve – into pixels? Into stitches? Into leaves? They’re hard to place. Step even closer, and the tiny dabs of paint become clear, and all that the lush, analog materiality of paint communicates. Cumulatively, they sway and breathe; individually, they may bleed or not quite fit. They are imperfect, bustling, alive and dreaming.

I work on paintings from ephemera alongside my work from photography. I decided to work on ephemera that related to trees and the woods in the middle of the process of making this painting. I learned a lot about leaf shape!

Kirstin writes:

I make labor intensive paintings of gridded dots. These works document fabric, wallpaper and photo-based source material. My most recent body of work has turned to the woods as its focus.

The paintings are made from digital patterns I make from photographs, which I then paint on a wet media acetate. The patterns are derived from the photographs, but also abstract and blur the photograph to a greater or lesser degree, depending upon scale and complexity of the image. I like to consider it a contemporary way of documenting our extraordinary woodland spaces of North America, in the tradition of panoramic and scenic wallpaper.

I have a slow deliberate process to make my paintings, but each one starts with a photograph, usually taken while walking in the woods. I look for spaces where I am in and of the woods, not outside or above. The spaces frequently are dense and enveloping, even if just quick stops on the trail. I don’t want a woods space that suggests mastery, more one that is a document made by someone at eye level in the space.

This photograph is then digitally translated into a pattern for cross stitch. I can use a greater or smaller number of pixels and manipulate the pattern for color. Then I print the pattern out on 8.5 x 11” printer paper and then tile the image.

After tiling the pattern for the image, I lay a layer of acetate on top and tape around the image again to hold it still. Then I begin color mixing to match the pattern. Most of the patterns are made to match embroidery thread, so I get to make my own palettes. I usually put them in small containers that look much like paint by number containers.

Then as I finish making a small palette of colors, I paint single colors over the surface, layer by layer. Sometimes I edit a color, or change a passage to my own liking, sometimes I repaint something that looks wrong. I am interested in the human hand making slippery or awkward marks but also choosing “wrong” colors to apply. I like working to failure and fatigue. I like the idea that I’m painting a machine-generated pattern, but my hand and idiosyncratic choices are my style and advantage here.

Zoom out of the work in process, showing how I work on the surface using a ladder. The ladder and blue tape also suggest the scale of the work.

I tend to work on multiple paintings at a time, to switch between paintings, and different ways of working. Here is an image of my studio with Side of the Trail in Rhode Island in process and some of the work I was making along the way. It took me a bit over two years to finish this painting, so I made a lot of different work alongside this painting. Here I am working on a smaller landscape and a French wallpaper picture.

When this work is complete I have to uninstall and reinstall it for photographs and for mounting to panel. This work was created on two separate strips of acetate, so I match them up each time I put the work up. See a photo here:

After separating the twin panels of acetate, I flipped them over and painted the back a deep raw umber. Having a color on the reverse side of the acetate gives the picture some very low depth and also showcases the areas where I have skipped and allowed the ground to show through.

The painting blurs between a focused Photorealism, a computer-generated pattern and a fetishized repetition of an acrylic paint mark. Much of what I do in the studio is mix and organize color. There is high labor behind the work, yet the effect is immediate and present.

I want the experience of my paintings to be much like walking in the woods. Surrounded by a fabric of green, an excess of detail, the labor of making the painting stands as a devotional homage to the complexity and slow growth of the forest. The painting space both slows you down to a single green space and holds you within many particular and singular snapshots in time.

I hope to image the woods in its current state, as it exists now, near me. We have precious resources in both humble scrub brush or elegant old growth forests, all worth documenting as they are seen in our moment.