And The Mood Is Right

It’s Friday night, and Roland O. Lamb ’06 is in front of an easel. In this second story room in Adams Art Space, far from the entryway parties, studio space and supplies are available to the public, and, thanks to Lamb, Friday night is Art Night.

He commandeered the space at the beginning of the semester, after hosting an informal art night in his room. He’d set aside Friday night for himself, so that he would find time for art in the bustle of the week. But then friends came, first to chat and then to dabble, and pretty soon the gathering outgrew the room.

Now Adams Art Space is a den for Lamb’s art. His distinctive hand-made lamps, constructed of light wooden frames and varying kinds of fine colored paper, hang from the ceiling, and his supplies cover every table surface. On Fridays, Lamb usually starts the evening by himself, absorbed in his own projects. People drift in over the course of an hour and half to work on their own pieces. Closing time has a tendency to determine itself; on some nights, Lamb packs up alone and on others, the group is working until 3 a.m.

The supplies for Art Night are all Lamb’s own, left over from an art class he teaches each summer in Vermont. In fact, the materials he uses give clues to his pre-Harvard life: one type of paper he uses for lamps is a thick Japanese rice paper, a token of the months he spent at an Japanese monastery; the tea that he offers his Art Night visitors is a reminder of his five years in England, where he attended Summerhill school, one of the most well-known non-traditional boarding schools in the world. But other aspects of Lamb’s past aren’t so easily revealed—in spite of his boyish appearance and Harvard Yard mailing address, Lamb is actually 24.

“I take my time doing things,” is the closest he comes to an explanation. He was raised in New Hampshire by his parents, Summerhill alums who brought the school’s ideals of an authority-free learning environment home. He was home-schooled, along with four siblings, until he left for Summerhill at the age of nine.

When he returned to the U.S. at 14, he took university classes and decided he wanted to go to college, but balked at putting together an application. With no conventional records of study, he proceeded to take a slightly more roundabout route: by the time he arrived at Harvard, he had taken university classes in Arizona, been kicked out of Cambridge Rindge and Latin for incurring too many absences, lived in nearly absoute silence in a monastery in Japan, cut down trees, maintained a library for a wealthy retired philosoper, and, of course, taught art.

Lamb’s second foray into Cambridge was more fruitful. He thrived in philosophy courses at Harvard Extension School and so impressed a professor that he was asked to return as a teaching assistant. Not long after that, he enrolled at Harvard College.

As an FM photographer snaps away at his most recent painting at Art Night, Lamb smiles bemusedly, almost apologetically. “This is a really silly painting.” He points to a dull red that appears on the canvas and calls it “an institutional red, like the red on the edge of buildings.” What it needs, of course, is something original to brighten it up—for which Lamb is a natural.