More love

So...here's another thing I love - the work of William Lamb. Lamb was a sculptor, a painter....an artist...and a great one. He was born in Montrose (that's Montrose in Scotland, people) in 1893 and died in the same Montrose in 1951. During the summer his studio is open to visitors (and it can be visited at other times by arrangement). It is well worth a visit - a small building housing a huge collection of fantastic sculptures in different media (as they say these days...) and some lovely watercolours (my favourite type of paintings) and beautifully-made drawings. I took an artist friend to visit this week and she was suitably impressed. So it's not just me - proper visual people like him too.

I'm always surprised Lamb is not better known but he's not very well known in Scotland, never mind beyond. I go every summer to visit the studio and cannot recommend it highly enough. He was commissioned to make busts of the young princesses (Elizabeth and Margaret) in the 1930s and that, in a way, is his claim to fame...which is a shame! Who gives a monkeys about royals who are just born into their privileged way of life? Not me. But an artist like Lamb who spent his life making amazing work for people to enjoy...now that's worth celebrating. He was injured in the First World War and had to retrain to work using his left hand. It's quite a story.

I wrote a poem about the Studio a couple of years ago. It's a plain little poem but I like to have some like that - they can't all be big fancy affairs and Lamb was not a fancy artist (though no wife, no children, lots of statues of pretty, pouting young boys...here's hoping...).Anyway, libellous comments aside, here's the poem. It rhymes. Reclaim the rhyme!


A visit to the William Lamb Studio, Montrose

Everyone is always fishing
And the wind so often blowing
Bits of some of life are missing
If not fishing then they're sowing
Wood is twirled and softly curving
Brass is firm and treacly browned
Faces, bodies, looking, learning
Hands of Lamb, so right, so sound

RF 2006