In this tell-all biography, journalist Richard Speer gives readers an all-access pass into the uproarious, uplifting life of Matt Lamb, a highly successful businessman turned world-famous painter. A rich and inspirational story, Matt Lamb: The Art of Success captures the essence of this flamboyant yet enigmatic figure and details how he transformed from his first success as CEO of a multi-million-dollar business to become one of the art world's most celebrated and controversial painters. Through candid interviews with Lamb, his family members, friends, detractors, and critics, readers will discover how Lamb came to run a family-owned funeral business with all the drama and pathos of the hit TV show, Six Feet Under only to be told by doctors he was dying of a grave illness and should begin planning his own funeral. Page after engaging page, Matt Lamb: The Art of Success moves on to reveal how Lamb beat the illness and lived to become a spiritually driven painter hailed as an heir to Pablo Picasso, all the while thumbing his nose at critics who dismissed him and his millions as the antithesis of starving-artist chic. Now in his 70s, Lamb is still moving and shaking, redefining the art world, and tackling his toughest challenge ever: painting for world peace. This book will uncover the secrets to Lamb's success in business and art and leave readers asking: What new adventures are around the corner for this maverick entrepreneur/philosopher? And what can we learn from his life?

Matt Lamb : The Art of Success

Speer, Richard

Business & Money

wiley

Silver Medal Winner, 2019 PubWest Book Design Awards
Eric Wert's flowers, fruits, and vegetables are the stuff of a florist's or farmer's perfection-objects of incomparable beauty, hyperrealistic, radiant, and arranged in a tumult that's filled with life. Within this bounty, the artist also recognizes the realities of the garden, forest, and field: snails, slugs, and ants; ladybugs, bees, and butterflies; leaves that decay, petals that fall, fruits that bruise, and vegetables that scar. These things come from the soil and, given time, there they will return with the rest of us. What remains beyond everything is the painting.
 Commentary on the wondrous nature of life and death, Wert's compositions also exist within the tradition of still life, taking cues from masters such as Rachel Ruysch, Henri Fantin-Latour, Ambrosius Bosschaert, Jan Davidsz. de Heem, and more. His backdrops-intricate tapestries rendered with historical accuracy-support each disheveled bouquet and overflowing centerpiece in form, color, and mood.
 Born in 1976 and raised in Oregon on twenty-five acres of tree- and critter-filled land, Wert developed an observant eye for the details amidst a visual onslaught. His studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago led to work as a scientific illustrator at the Field Museum of Natural History. After earning an MFA from Northwestern University, the artist began to create the paintings documented here: a body of work that establishes Wert as a modern master.
 Eric Wert: Still Life chronicles the artist's rise to maturity, from otherworldly graphite drawings of cacti to the stunning oil paintings he is now known for. In essays, critic Richard Speer details Wert's artistic evolution, and longtime friend Shawn Vandor places Wert's art within a wider academic and cultural context. Finally, the artist details his meticulous process, providing a rare peek at the way these dripping, tumbling, tangled, restless depictions of flowers and produce are made.

Eric Wert: Still Life

Arts & Photography

Vandor, Shawn

Wert, Eric

History & Criticism

Pomegranate

Matt Lamb: The Art of Success

Technical mastery and a visionary worldview meet in the narrative Romantic sculpture of Martin Eichinger. For half a century, this ambitious artist and Renaissance Man has created compelling visual rhapsodies, primarily in cast bronze, that tackle the most significant ideas of our time, even as they speak to the ages: the glories of science, technology, and human aspiration; the enduring potency of myth; the allure and complexity of strong women; the pull of far-flung locales and cultures; and the dynamics of romantic relationships. Honored by the National Endowment for the Arts, awarded prestigious commissions, his works collected by royalty, connoisseurs, and cultural/educational institutions the world over, he has enjoyed a caliber of success many artists only dream of. In this comprehensive monograph, art critic Richard Speer traces Eichinger's trajectory from boyhood in the Midwest, his evolution as a thinker and young sculptor, and the trailblazing career he forged in adulthood, centered in his sprawling, Italianate studio in Portland, Oregon. Interviews with colleagues, friends, family members, and the women in his life flesh out a portrait of the artist as an activist, deploying his formidable technique and dramatically spiraling compositions in the service of positive values and sociopolitical change. "I want to make things that are beautiful," he reflects, "but I'm not interested in beauty alone. I want the beauty to say something."Illustrated with stunning color plates and enlivened by the artist's original poetry and passionate convictions about art's role in the history of civilizations, From the Heart: The Sculpture of Martin Eichinger celebrates the life's work of a modern mythmaker.

From the Heart: Sculpture of Martin Eichinger

Individual Artists

Jorvik Press

One of the world's preeminent Abstract Expressionists, California-born painter Sam Francis (1923-1994) first traveled to Japan in 1957, quickly established studios and residences there, and became active in a circle of avant-garde artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, and composers, including members of the nascent Gutai and Mono-ha movements. This book chronicles those connections, as well as his complex and evolving relationship with East Asian aesthetics from the 1950s through the 1990s. From the very first exhibitions Francis had in Tokyo, critics linked his evocative use of negative space with the Japanese concept of "ma", a symbolically rich interval between objects or ideas. This shared pictorial and philosophical syntax laid the foundation for a feedback loop of mutual influence that spurred frequent collaborations between the artist and his Japanese contemporaries, extending into the realms of printmaking, ceramics, music, poetry, publishing, and performance. Written by art critic and curator Richard Speer, with a foreword by Debra Burchett-Lere, executive director/president of the Sam Francis Foundation, this is the first full-length monograph to explore an important but sometimes overlooked milieu in Post-World War II art--a dialogue between Eastern and Western sensibilities that prefigured our current era of global interconnectedness and cross-cultural exchange. Lavishly illustrated with color plates and archival images, it is an adjunct publication for the related exhibition "Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021), co-curated by Speer.

The Space of Effusion: Sam Francis in Japan

Scheidegger and Spiess

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Books by Speer, Richard