Sandra Lamb - Book - Lucy and the Big Mistake

$25.00 CAD

Sandra Lamb - Book - Lucy and the Big Mistake

Excerpt: Lucy likes to try new things but she hasn’t figured out what’s smart and what’s not. One day, she makes a really big mistake and it takes a lot of help from her friends in the forest to make her feel better.

Lucy and the Big Mistake is a simple story about choices, mistakes and unconditional love.

BIOGRAPHY

The story is common: Promising young artist rises in the ranks, gets married, has kids, kids grow up, artist starts all over again. So here I am, building a body of work in my middle years and trusting that my initial sales successes will continue to climb.

I started my artistic forays as a toddler and landed my first paying job in the arts at age twelve. Soon after high school, I entered the advertising and graphic arts world where I made a successful career as a production manager and art director in Calgary, eventually opting for freelance and the freedom it gave.

During my years as a stay-at-home mom, I never fully-stopped the sideline of graphic and fine art, continuing to freelance for the local leisure arts centre and teaching fine art in the evenings. I wrote a daily cartoon strip for about five years and sold it to several community newspapers around the country. I learned web-design and computer graphics which I turned into more freelance work. I began illustrating children's books.

Although I still enjoy the graphic arts world, I find it most liberating to create according to my own ideas and sensitivities which tend to lean towards beauty and the evolution of the human spirit. The work I enjoy most is narrative and figurative and I look for the unusual "twist" in a given situation; that particular point in time where anything might happen. My goal is to create images difficult to walk by or ignore... images that somehow tug at the psyche, knock at the door of the spirit.

The past year or two has found my work taking on more of the abstract which adds to the mystery of each piece. Whether depicting something in which I find beauty or asking deeper questions, I know that my own evolution into the edges of the non-representational has given me a new challenge and further depth. Always, the adventure continues.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I collect old photographs, random snapshots from friends, magazine advertisements. It's partially for reference but mostly for that shard of expression or movement that inspires the "what if"? beginnings of a visual story. The process of my work is a bit like designing a set for the climax of a play and then placing the characters, caught at their moment of crisis. Humour often creeps into my paintings and I use it consciously whenever I can. For me art must be communication with the viewer and it must always ask the questions, perhaps only hinting at the answers. As I get older and wiser, I find myself producing looser, simpler images, sometimes just as an ode to the beauty of the moment, often as glimpses of the innocent human spirit. What I am ultimately looking for are the deeper and more complex precipices, the turning points in personal evolution.