Dr. Lam’s Art

Facial Plastic Surgery requires a good artistic eye and a gentle hand. Dr. Lam is an accomplished artist outside of his clinical practice and has painted and drawn portraits, landscapes, and abstract art work. He has created his art in many different media including acrylic, oil, graphite, charcoal, watercolor, ink and wash, color pencil, color marker, lithograph, pastel, and mixed media. He also is a graphic artist and has designed all of his own logos, business cards, illustrations for his textbooks, designs for his book covers, websites, etc. and is proficient with Adobe Illustrator. He has a deep passion for art and is driven by offering patient’s his artistic eye and touch in every case. When he is not painting, he is visiting art museums and learning from great artists of the past. His favorite artists include Sol Lewitt, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, David Hockney, Morris Louis, Wolf Khan, Constantin Brancusi, among many others.
“By Your Side”, Oil on panel, 9 x 12 in. My mom Carol has been asking me to do a painting of my two kids walking hand in hand away from the viewer, that is, just their backs, after she saw an abstract painting of two children in the same pose in a gallery in Toronto. My nanny Becky actually has an undergraduate degree in photography, and she was kind enough to take the reference photo of my two kids in our backyard. She really captured the emotion behind this simple gesture where Enzo is leading Alessandra to the playground. I wanted to create a painting that combined a somewhat realistic foreground of the two children so that you could easily identify that it was my two kids even though it was from the backside alongside an impressionistic background filled with color since my mom loves bright colors, as I do. By making the background impressionistic with loose gestures I think I created a wonderful juxtaposition of two styles that work well together in a complementary fashion. I have already ordered a simple white wood floater frame that my mom approved, as she is very particular about what she wants. She said she loves it, which makes me happy!
“Sleeping Beauties”, oil on panel, 6 x 8 in. This tiny painting was inspired when I saw my son Enzo asleep in the upstairs living room floor with the afternoon light bathing his skin tones. I had my daughter Alessandra pose being asleep, which I then flipped the photo to make the composition work and joined the two images into one for this painting. I purchased a custom frame that I love from Batican, an American who learned his trade in Florence, Italy. The frame which features an Arched Flemish Corner design with a pale gold frame really intrigued me and reminded me of the old Flemish Renaissance paintings and will truly make this painting even more intriguing to look at. This painting took me a day to complete, as compared with my last massive painting that I just finished, the Hero & The Princess, that took over 3 months to do so. I cannot wait for the paint to dry so that I can put it in its lovely custom frame!
“The Hero & The Princess”, oil on canvas, 48 x 72. in. This painting features my daughter Alessandra, my princess, on the right side with all of her favorite characters and my son Enzo, my hero, on the left side with all of his favorite cartoon characters. My daughter guided me on most of the selections she wanted, including having her best friend Carver featured, whom I turned into a mermaid. This painting took over 3 months to complete and will hang in my son’s room for him hopefully to enjoy every day since he is transfixed by the art in our home that I have created, and I also hope that Alessandra will continue to enjoy it since she always asks to come to my art studio to check out the progress of the painting. I am going to miss taking her every day to my studio to show her what daddy painted for her that day. I really enjoyed the challenge of making fanciful portraits that seamlessly and creatively blended with the surrounding comic and cartoon characters who are of various levels of realism from portrait to simple flat figures. I really love using the cloud motif to bind and blend various elements together, which also allowed me to feature a lot of sumptuous colors that I truly love. I have also already purchased a large white floater frame that will arrive soon.
“Hope”, oil on Belgian linen panel, 12 x 12 in. panels, triptych. This more intimate painting follows my very large 10 ft. canvas “Hope Eternal” for DCAC. Enzo, Alessandra, and Kenji will be hung next to a portrait of Ellie and me I did a few years ago and wow what an evolution I’ve experienced over the last 2-3 years. My skin tones look so much more complex and realistic. After drying and framing, these portraits will be at my office in the newer wing along the main corridor left to the entrance of my hair transplant operatory.
“Hope Eternal”, 120 x 60 in. (10 x 5 ft.), two panels, oil and acrylic on canvas. The background was lovingly painted by the children of the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center (DCAC), of which I was honorary chair with Ellie last year for their Art for Advocacy event and to which this painting will be donated for the same event this year. This project has been one of my most ambitious in scale, effort, and creativity, which took me 3 months and over 200 hours to complete and just made it for deadline today, June 15, to be considered for NorthPark viewing. The funny thing is that I had already conceived this project a year ago with the title in mind and did not know that this year’s theme was “Hope” with the tag line “Paint me a picture of Hope”, so it is quite fitting that my painting captures the idea of hope. Birds and flowers are the central theme that encircle the children and serve as touch points of hope. If people do not know about DCAC, it is a charity committed to help children who have been abused in all different ways and is there to serve to stop this horrible crime and to bring those to justice who perpetrate it and to heal those who have suffered from it. I am honored to donate this piece that can be hung as two companion pieces or as a combined diptych. The painting includes two young children that I have altered from the references to make them exactly how I want them to appear along with 65 birds, 35 animals, 135 flowers, and a lot of fruits, leaves, and other elements. I love how this painting combines the abstract elements from the children and figurative elements that I made, which I worked to make sure that I could incorporate their freestyling abstractions tied into my representational portions. For example, I made their bluish areas on the bottom into ponds and other swirls into areas where clouds breakthrough them. I am hoping to raise a substantial amount on behalf of this charity. The event will be held Saturday, September 16, 2023. For ticket information or for donating opportunities, please PM me.
Kenji on Copper”, oil on copper, 16 x 16 in. This is my first painting of my new dog Kenji whom I have had for the past year and who looks uncannily like my prior dog Kumo whom I have painted in almost every medium. This is also the first time that I have painted on copper, which I have wanted to do for quite awhile. Copper is a classic substrate that was a choice of many Renaissance painters like Raphael and Da Vinci due to its luminous qualities. I kept the background entirely raw so that you could truly see the brilliance of its natural color. The first layer was really tough because the paint does not bleed into the surface as it does into gesso. By the second layer, everything returns to normal, but I was prepared for that after doing a lot of reading about copper before starting the painting. I was initially going to do Kenji on a brown Corbusier chair to make the entire painting tone on tone browns and oranges but realized that I couldn’t communicate the emotion of the face or the detail of the fur, so I decided on a closeup of his face. In general, I do not like to make a photorealistic painting but prefer instead to give my own interpretation to a painting by staying somewhat between realism and abstraction. However, in this case, I decided to add 7 to 8 layers of details to make it close to photorealism because I knew that with the simple composition, there were going to be only two elements to make it visually engaging: the shiny copper background and the level of detail of the execution. It was a joy to paint the level of detail into this painting. The frame that I have custom made for this piece is really interesting with beveled edges, and I will post it when I finally have it completed.
“Luminosity”, Oil on Panel, 14 x 14 in. This painting has been in my creative mind for over a year germinating. I couldn’t think of how to execute on it. Originally, it was going to be a wide format painting when Enzo was still crawling. But it just didn’t feel right. I turned that canvas panel into an English garden instead. I received this frame as a gift to try out a new series of floater frames and I thought the square format would be perfect to capture both Enzo and Alessandra. We recently returned from a cruise in December and I captured a great photo of Alessandra in the Bahamas and on the previous day Enzo in Tortola, BVI. I thought that combining both of them would be ideal. I reversed the reference photo of Alessandra to get the lighting and shadows to match Enzo. I worked to get the proportions of two of them to make sense in the same frame. I was inspired by the color choices by the London-based artist Victoria Obolensky’s seascapes in terms of the sky colors and some of the foamy waves. It was interesting how distorting a photograph really is, and I had to adjust proportions on Enzo due to the distorting lens of the camera to make the painting look right. When I started to add beautiful colors to Enzo’s chest of Montserrat orange and orchid to capture and tie in the colors of the sky, I really got excited and redid all of the flesh tones for both of them. There was a void on the bottom left, so I added crashing waves and rocks to increase visual intrigue and to become a third element of interest in the portrait. The four rocks also represent the four members of my family. Look carefully and you will see the rocks and up churned sand under the water on the bottom left to hint at the shoreline. The title of the painting comes from the liminal glow of light at the end of the day, as I find this light more interesting than broad daylight, when the reference photos were taken. I am at heart a colorist and wanted the saturated colors to really make this painting pop, and the imagined end of day light helped me achieve that goal. The color rendering is a bit impressionistic, as I do not want to try to achieve photorealism but to guide the viewer toward an appreciation for a painted work that may not truly exist in reality. Luminosity also represents the brightness that these two kids have in my life.
“Les Arcs de Triomphe”, Acrylic & Oil on Panel, 26.5 in. diameter tondo. This tondo was going to be a portrait of Enzo but after finishing the square piece “Arcs + Stripes Forever”, I couldn’t resist doing one more abstract piece. The title obviously comes from my Francophilia and the monument in Paris. I wanted to do all arcs with no stripes for this round panel to highlight the roundness of the panel’s shape. Also, as I finished making all the stripes, I realized that the painting simply did not have enough complexity, so I knew that adding amazing shadows would take it to another level. Looking at a photograph of some black tape that I had still on the panel, I realized that the shadow should be cast at a distance from the original lines unlike my previous painting, which would have made the previous painting way too busy. These shadows not only would add depth and intrigue but also serve as additional lines without over busying the composition. Fortunately, the gamble paid off and it has taken the painting from good to great in my opinion. I had to invent a new way of doing shadows since the use of linseed oil on the oil paint actually retarded the already slow dry times with oil and even now 2 weeks after completing the last painting it is still somewhat wet. I decided to use an alkyd to thin down the paint but also accelerate the dry times (see the end for an artist’s tip). That was important because unlike the last painting which only had one level of shadows, this painting has multiple layered shadows where you will see three levels of shadows all overlapping one another and with a very slow dry time this painting would have taken 3 months to complete rather than 2 weeks. Casting shadows farther away also was difficult in terms of creating realism in an abstract piece but it was fun because I was able to make each stripe look like a different height based on the darkness, size, distance, and blur of the shadow. In fact, I loved making the shadows of different intensities all in one individual shadow. Ok, I could go on and on about shadows. The other reason this painting lacked complexity is that it simply had fewer stripes on it so it looked boring without sufficient and different shadows. I actually added shadows to almost every first layer line unlike the last painting to further deepen the complexity. Like the previous painting, this painting has all unique colors grouped in families.
Here is a listing of them.
1ST LAYER (MAIN CIRCLE) INWARD TO OUTWARD REDS: Light Magenta, Naphthol Red Light, Medium Magenta, Quinacridone Crimson, C.P. Cadmium Red Light, Red Oxide
1ST LAYER (MAIN CIRCLE) INWARD TO OUTWARD BLUES: Prussian Blue Hue, Light Phthalo Blue, Magenta Blue Hue, Light Ultramarine Blue, Cobalt Blue
2ND LAYER (CIRCLE TOUCHING MIDDLE) INWARD TO OUTWARD: Fluorescent Pink, Fluorescent Red
3RD LAYER (CIRCLE TOUCHING MIDDLE) INWARD TO OUTWARD YELLOWS: C.P. Cadmium Yellow Medium, Naples Yellow Hue, C.P. Cadmium Yellow Primrose
3RD LAYER (CIRCLE TOUCHING MIDDLE) INWARD TO OUTWARD ORANGES: Luminous Orange, Light Apricot, Cadmium Orange
4TH LAYER (CIRCLE TOUCHING MIDDLE) INWARD TO OUTWARD GREEN: Light Phthalo Green, Fluorescent Green
4TH LAYER (CIRCLE TOUCHING MIDDLE) INWARD TO OUTWARD PURPLES: Light Violet, Dioxazine Purple.
SIGNATURE: Iridescent Stainless Steel
DATE: Iridescent Bronze. Now the question is where am I going to hang this painting. I have 3 ideas I want to discuss with Ellie.
TIP FOR ARTISTS: For the alkyd I used initially was one from Chelsea Studios. It is supposedly non-toxic but I hated the smell, so I don’t think it could be that great for you. Also, it does not dry fast enough. Definitely do not use Liquin. With the petroleum content, it is highly toxic, which I learned the hard way with horrible headaches. M.Graham’s Walnut Alkyd is all natural, no smell, and dries the fastest. It is simply the best that I have found so far.
“Arcs + Stripes Forever”, Acrylic & Oil on Panel, 30 x 30 in. This painting was requested by Ellie for many years, wanting some hard-edged abstractions for our home. I simply could not do it with my drift into representational art. This is the first fully abstract piece in probably 4 years for me. I took a lot from what I learned with my representational work into this piece in its shadowing. This artwork is a site-specific work for our walk-in closet and will sit squarely in the middle dividing our two sides. I started with blues on the left (my side) and pinkish-reds on the right (her side). I worked to keep all of the colors so that there would be families of colors: all blues on the left, pinks on the right, green stripe in the middle, purples on the top left, metals on the upper right, neutrals on the bottom left, and yellow oranges on the bottom right. Also, there are no repeating colors in this painting. All colors only appear in one arc or stripe with a total of 57 different colors in total with no whites or blacks. They are pure colors for optimal flatness and chromatic intensity. This work is inspired in part by the 1960s conceptual art movement like the greats of Sol LeWitt whom I adore. Even though you do not feel my hand per se, there were many technical challenges I had to overcome to produce this work. Putting transparent colors on top of opaque ones and working on multiple layers without bleeding into each other required a new thinking and methodology. I used a clear gesso to seal the edges followed by 5-6 layers of white gesso to prime each top layer to make the colors pop and not have unwanted transparency from previous layers. I also used a new type of compass to get the arcs perfect as well as very thin tape to make the edges correct rather than an X-Acto knife which I used in the past. Also, it took me about a week to get the shadows correct, and I had to resort to using oil paints to make them look right along with linseed oil, a rag, a cotton-tip applicator, my ungloved finger, and various colors. It took as long to get the painting done as to do the shadows. I still need to make a few minor adjustments to the painting.
The colors featured in this painting are as follows.
BLUES LEFT TO RIGHT: Anthraquinone Blue, Cerulean Blue Deep, Brilliant Blue, Light Phthalo Blue, Cerulean Blue, Bright Aqua Green, Ultramarine Blue, Light Turquois (Phthalo), Cobalt Blue, Phthalo Blue (Red Shade), Prussian Blue Hue, Cobalt Turquoise, Manganese Blue Hue, Light Ultramarine Blue, Primary Cyan
PINKS LEFT TO RIGHT: Light Magenta, Violet Oxide, Pyrrole Red, Red Oxide, Fluorescent Pink, Quinacridone Crimson, Medium Magenta, Fluorescent Red, Naphthol Red Light, C.P. Cadmium Red Dark, Violette Rouge (Flash Paint),Burnt Sienna
HORIZONTAL GREEN STRIPES TOP TO BOTTOM: Hooker’s Green Hue, Light Green (Blue Shade), Permanent Green Light, Light Green (Yellow Shade), Light Phthalo Green, Chromium Oxide Green, Fluorescent Green
HORIZONAL BISECTING STRIPES (UPPER): Ultramarine Violet, Permanent Violet Dark
CENTRAL ARCS (UPPER) TOP TO BOTTOM: C.P. Cadmium Red Light, Deep Violet
HORIZONTAL BISECTING STRIPES (LOWER): Light Apricot, Cadmium Orange
PURPLE ARCS TOP TO BOTTOM: Dioxazine Purple, Light Violet, Medium Violet
YELLOW ORANGE ARCS TOP TO BOTTOM: C.P. Cadmium Yellow Medium, Luminous Orange, C.P. Cadmium Yellow Primrose, Pyrrole Orange, Titanate Yellow
UPPER ARCS (RIGHT) LEFT TO RIGHT: Iridescent Bronze, Iridescent Gold (Fine), Iridescent Copper (Fine), Iridescent Silver (Fine)
LOWER ARCS (LEFT) LEFT TO RIGHT: Titan Buff, N6 Neutral Gray, Payne’s Gray
MY SIGNATURE: Naples Yellow Hue, Yellow Ochre
“Mornings with Morandi”, 32 x 14 in., Oil on oil-primed Raymar Belgian linen board (Claessens C15SP). This painting was inspired by an article on Giorgio Armani’s favorite artist Giorgio Morandi. I love his semi-abstract table top still life’s. His restrained use of color is stunning. I went to a breakfast at a hotel that Ellie got for us for my birthday and loved the biscuits, bottle, and flower so I decided to make those the central theme. Visiting a friend’s home I decided to add some Chinese pieces which I thought would add intrigue and also reflect my cultural heritage. I started to paint the vase and the lion with great detail so much so that the abstracted initial work did not match. So through 7-9 revisions of the flowers and other elements, I continually made my painting progressively more detailed. I wanted to frame the right side with a photo of my kids and also the Morandi book and under which is the book written by my uncle Timothy S Lam on Tang Ceramics to tie into the Chinese theme. I left the two white vases a bit more abstracted and lopsided with a restraint in color as an homage to Morandi’s work, which is also reflected on the book cover. Elsinore Lam mentioned that the background looked empty, so I added an ornate frame. After doing that, she mentioned that the other side looked empty so I added a clock, which she suggested. I like how one uses silver and one gold. When looking at the shadows I added to those frames, the rest of the painting looked flat, so I added more and more shadows. When adding those shadows I realized that the wall was too close to the table objects and I needed to add wall shadows, which really made this painting pop! The torn open orange is a memento mori like old still life’s. The purple glass vase was seen in the McNay Museum in San Antonio and I had to add it when I saw it. The jade necklace and tablecloth are from my mom that I requested to paint. This painting has a custom wood frame and will be featured in my office. If you are a patient, look for it next year when the paint has properly dried.
“Eden”, 32 x 14 in., Oil on oil-primed Raymar Belgian linen board (Claessens C15SP). This very long-format painting took me almost two months to complete. The title comes from, of course, the Biblical narrative of our finding an untrammeled earth free of our current problems that will come again with the new heaven and earth. It is an idyllic meditation and an escape from our busy urban life. The development of the painting came from multiple source photos and a free-floating imagination. I developed the idea as I progressed with no pre planning whatsoever. Initially, I wanted to capture an English garden with its free-form, unstructured appearance to allow your eye to meander along the paths and foliage as you like. I then paid homage to Monet’s famed Giverny garden that I had the pleasure to visit a few years back with the waterlilies and Japanese bridge. William Morris’ Red House on the far left harkens back to the call that he had to leave the city for a newfound Eden in the countryside. I always wanted a gazebo, which I added to the far left, and also a fountain. These human elements punctuate an otherwise all-nature landscape, also symbolizing our relationship with God. I also love flowers, as you know, so this gave me the opportunity to showcase many small flowers strewn across the landscape. This painting will be framed in a thin black metal frame and will be hung at the entrance to my own garden. Thanks to Ellie for giving me that idea. Hope you enjoy it!
“Floris III”, oil on two panels, each 11 x 12 in. My mom asked me to paint single flowers for her in two accompanying frames, which I obliged. These are two of my favorite flowers: a violet Hellebore and a blue Peony. I like their complexity and shape: one head on and one at an angle. I love the blues and purples together, which are visually very soothing. Surprisingly, this small painting took me almost 2 weeks to complete, whereas my last one with 26 flowers took me only 3 weeks (but I was under a time pressure to complete it). I added the leaves to create some more visual intrigue. Unilike the last two paintings, which I painted flowers in oil on black gesso, I painted this one on black oil paint, which was interesting because it absorbed the chroma of the oil paint a lot and required more layers of paint to restore the vibrancy. The panels are cradled in a floating, deep, black metal frame.
“Floris II”, Oil on Black Gesso Canvas, 60 x 60 in. (5 x 5 ft). This painting is a second painting in my flower series in the same spiral configuration as Floris I, but the flowers are much bigger, brighter, and singular. This painting will be donated to the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center (DCAC) Art for Advocacy Gala this Fall, of which Elsinore and I are honorary chairs. It will be auctioned for $9,950 but can be purchased at the beginning of the gala for $24,875 (if you are the first to bid). Your donation will be given 100% tax deduction and will go to stop the absolutely horrible crime of child abuse. I worked super hard to finish this painting before May 31 in order to meet the submission deadline to be considered to be shown in NorthPark Mall in August before the gala. I will let you know on June 7 if this piece is selected by the curatorial committee for viewing there. This should have taken me 5 weeks to complete but I did it in under 3 weeks because Ellie allowed me to work around the clock to finish it in time.
“Floris I”. Oil on Black Gesso Canvas. 60 x 60 in. (5 x 5 ft.). This painting took me exactly a month to complete. As you know, I absolutely love flowers and have painted them in all levels of abstraction to realism. This is my most realistic portrayal of flowers but at the same time the arrangement is entirely unrealistic and fanciful. Painting realistic flowers on a table, for example, is more classical but a bit boring to me. Painting them realistically but in an unusual arrangement adds visual intrigue and renders the design modern. I will be making a similar one “Floris II” for a charity.
“Birds of Paradise 2”, Oil on Black Gesso Canvas, 144 x 48 in. (12 x 4 feet), diptych. This massive painting took me 5 weeks to complete and features 47 birds of various sizes, colors, and origins. The panel on the left has 17 birds and the one on the right has 30 birds. There are two central trees on the left and one on the right panel. The painting is framed with a large yellow tree in the far left foreground and a waterfall in the far right background. The birds were painted more realistically than the trees and the leaves, which are more stylized, flatter, and abstract. The birds started out more abstract but I migrated all of them to become more realistic as the painting progressed. This sort of reminds me of a Chinese privacy screen. I don’t know if you know what I’m talking about. This painting will be hung in the lobby of my building between the spa and the salon in the next 2 months, so if you are in Plano, please stop by to view it!
“Mes Anges”, Watercolor on Aquaboard, 12 x 12 in., Diptych. I changed the title of this diptych. Returning to watercolor after a two-year hiatus was quite challenging but working on Aquabord made it uniquely rewarding. These two watercolors will be framed with individual 2 in. deep, floating, black metal frames and will most likely be hung in my art studio. With Aquabord I won’t need to put glass over it, just a simple varnish, which will reduce glare and highlight the intensity of the colors. I can’t really photograph the colors, which in real life are much brighter, smoother, and far richer.
“I Bambini”, Watercolor on Aquabord, 12 x 12 in., part of a planned diptych. I haven’t done watercolor in two years, and at that time I had no idea what I was doing. I was mainly working monochromatically because I was scared to explore color but now I can’t live without color. Using my 108 Holbein watercolors I bought two years ago but almost never used, I made this watercolor after watching a few hours of Ali Cavanaugh’s work on Patreon. The photographed colors look muddy and terrible, but in real life the colors are deeply saturated with beautiful hues and intensity. The subtle gradations are lost in the photography unfortunately. I painted on Aquabord for the first time and it was revelatory. Despite the first two hours of wanting to pull my hair out, I finally started to get the hang of it. The amazing thing about Aquabord is that you can actually erase your work, it can accept up to many many layers unlike paper, does not tear, retains much higher pigment load since the colors do not get muted by the absorbed paper, and finally does not require glass (just a varnish), so I can display my watercolor completely naked to the eye. I worked hard to stay in the same color family for the skin and hair tones, the clothing, and the background using mainly purples, yellow/orange, and a little pink. Even though this painting was not a limited palette, it is much more cohesive in color than my last painting I believe.
“Le Bosquet”, oil on canvas, 72 x 48 in. The title comes from the name that the artist Pierre Bonnard gave his villa where he retired just outside of Cannes, France. Bonnard was the inspiration for this work, as I love his use of colors and composition. I visited the Kimbell to study his masterpiece, Landscape at Le Cannet, which is a hill near his villa. I worked and reworked this piece. The hardest part was unifying the disparate colors. I see why some artists insist on using a limited palette. As I finished part of the right side, I knew that I had to draw the colors over to the left and down to the bottom to make this painting harmonious. The large tree on the left was my first move of getting the green to frame both sides. Drawing the dark blue landscape into the middle was the second major move. Third was tying the orange across and down. As you see in the original reference photo, it was all green. Also, as an homage to Bonnard, there are some small quirky animals that you barely notice unless you look more carefully. The painting is much better seen in person than in a small photo. Look at the closeups and the video to get a better impression of how it really looks in person. The painting will be framed in a black floating metal frame and will hang over the bed in the second master. There will be a flood of sunlight on it to illuminate the bright colors. At heart, I am so inspired by the color field artists, especially Wolf Kahn and Morris Louis.