TEL: +27(0)83 444 3772 / +27(0)21 683 9955
EMAIL: lambert@lambert-art.com / info@lambert-art.com
I was born in 1951. I taught myself to draw while very young and began to paint in watercolour at the age of 9 or 10. At the age of 11 I was drawing pencil portraits, and at 12 learning to paint in oils. Soon after entering high school I sold my first oil painting. By the time I graduated from high school with art as a subject, I was able to sell small impressionistic landscapes, interiors and still lives to local collectors and art dealers on a sporadic basis. I'd won most of the annual art trophies at school, and one of my life drawings had taken a first prize in competition with university art students. I felt confident of my ability to earn a living as an artist.
We'd studied the impressionists and post-impressionists in high school, touching briefly on the birth of modern abstract art. Although I admired Picasso, Braque and Paul Klee, I began to feel that the modern movement had somehow thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Having recently encountered the work of the abstract expressionists for the first time, I began to experiment with a similar painting technique. I wanted to bring together the Zen-like spontaneity of the abstract expressionists and the depth and power of Rembrandt and Turner's late work. After trying my utmost I had to face the fact that I simply wasn't ready to do this yet. I looked at the local art schools, concluded that I'd be unlikely to find the help I needed there, and decided to go it alone.
In order to make ends meet I would take on any art-related task I could find and teach myself how to do it as I went along. In this way I learned something of sign-writing, calligraphy, illustration, film and theatre design, draughtsmanship and sculpture. Whenever possible I continued to paint and sell my work. I have been a full-time artist since 1975. During this time, I have held 17 one-man shows and taken part in many group exhibitions. Between 1986 and 1994 I designed ten sets of postage stamps. My third series won second prize in the national Stamp Designer of the Year competition. In 1995 I won Best Work on Show in The Pulse of Africa exhibition - one of the fringe events at the first Johannesburg Biennale. In the same year one of my paintings was chosen for the 'Top 70' exhibition in the 'Art 95' competition in New York. .
Having been a long-time admirer of the old masters and having studied their work first hand in Europe, I learned from Ralph Rillman Miller, the well-known portrait painter, how to make my own paints and mediums according to traditional formulae. For five years I worked almost exclusively with hand-made paint before adapting the technique for use with modern tube paints. In 1996/7 I was commissioned by Sun International to paint a mural and several large oils which are prominently displayed in The Table Bay Hotel. German television producer Albert Krogman saw my work there and filmed an interview with me in my studio, demonstrating the making and use of hand-made paint. This was shown twice on a German television channel.
After participating in a group show by South African artists in Holland in 1998, I was sponsored to hold a one-man show in The Hague in October 2003. The exhibition was opened by the South African Ambassador to the Netherlands, Ms P. Jana. I subsequently held my 17th one-man show at Johans Borman Fine Art Gallery in Cape Town in October 2003.
Although my work had become increasingly realistic during most of my career, in 1999 I spontaneously began painting miniature abstracts. While playing with a new type of paint, I'd stumbled on a way to give substance to my old dream of a style that would bring together the spontaneity of the abstract expressionists and the depth of the old masters. To begin with I pursued this as a sideline, gradually increasing the scale of my work as I went along. For a few years I worked under a pseudonym to avoid confusing my regular customers. Eventually, having successfully completed a 2 x 3 metre abstact oil in 2010, I decided it was time for me to begin exhibiting my new work under my own name.
In late 2011 I came across an internet gallery that holds back-to-back exhibitions by artists from all over the world. I applied for a one-man show and was given the slot from 31st December 2011 to 3rd February 2012. Although the show has already closed, the work can still be seen at www.greenchair-gallery.co.uk under "Past Exhibitions". This was my first one-man show of the new work, and has attracted numerous favourable comments from various parts of the world, as well as overtures from a number of galleries, including one in New York. I'm currently busy placing my new work in an entirely new network of galleries, beginning with South Africa and hopefully gradually expanding to the rest of the world.
New government legislation requires that every business that has a website must display a "Section 51 manual" on its website. This has to do with ensuring that members of the public have access to information that may be relevant to them.
You can read my Section 51 Manual here.
You can download my Form C here.
