SAMA - Lost Identities - Clifford Lamoree

Clifford Lamoree

Artist Clifford Lamoree belongs to the group of Surrealist artists, including Rene Magritte and Salvador

Dali, united by an inclination to create precisely rendered, representational imagery of irrational, absurd or

counterintuitive ideas or fantasies. Lamoree eschews the aim merely to capture pleasurably beautiful things;

rather, he paints in order to visualize his feelings and observations about the world, which he accomplishes by

means of a Surrealist vocabulary with existential connotations. He presents a world that is lost and barren.

Anxiety and dread reign supreme.

Lamoree has labored extensively over his paintings and sculptures for many years. His artistic career

began while serving in the U.S. Air Force in Turkey as Station Manager for the Armed Forces Radio. There, he

painted the Turkish landscape and came to the realization that he wanted to be an artist. Upon leaving the

Air Force in 1967, Lamoree studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts but left the academy

after two years, finding himself frustrated and unable to paint. Away from the classroom

environment, he began painting again, composing images from memory. The result was a small painting,

The Beginning (1971), which opened his creative "floodgates." In 1971, Lamoree reentered the Academy

and graduated in 1973. That same year, he was awarded the Henry J. Scheidt Memorial Traveling

Scholarship. Since then, he has received numerous awards, including the Thomas E. Clarke Prize from the

National Academy of Design, the Mary Butler Memorial Trust Fund Purchase Award from the Pennsylvania

Academy of the Fine Arts and the Lynn Martin Memorial Award.

True to Surrealism, Lamoree has endeavored to broaden our view of reality by painting images that

belong to the realm of dreams and nightmares. In the philosophical manner of Magritte, the dreams in

question are not the dreams conjured by sleep, but instead self-willed dreams1, "dreams which are intended

to wake you up."2 Lamoree practices the Surrealist approach that fuses irrationality to optical clarity.

Cognitively, we measure reality with certain tools—the eye chief among them. Surrealist painters play with

this most intrinsic human quality by presenting viewers with irrationalities or absurdities in such an optically

precise manner that the counterintuitive scene is both unassailable and impossible.

Lamoree’s paintings are born of concerns regarding current sociological conditions, the loss of spirituality,

ecological pollution, the threat of nuclear annihilation, among others. His painting Rush Hour (2001) shows headless men in black coats carrying umbrellas and briefcases. They walk about in a desolate gray city. The umbrella men are cold, faceless, black figures akin to Dante’s lost souls in the Divine Comedy. Lamoree states that "the umbrella is to them as a blanket is to an infant: security in this case, protecting them from acknowledging their actions. They remain cold, aloof. There is no expression of warmth, instead an intense finality." The grim image brings to mind the nineteenth century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s words: "I stick my finger into existence—it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world? Who is it who has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me here? How did I come into the world? Why was I not

consulted?" In Lamoree’s painting, Perdition (2000), the same headless men in black are ascending a volcano

where they will be incinerated. About this, Lamoree comments, "the figures are hollow, both visually and

spiritually...they are headless, symbolizing a non-thinking society." Perdition and Rush Hour address the

dichotomy of conformity verses individuality, a recurring theme in Lamoree’s work.

Echo from the Future (2001) and Madonna of the Laptop (2000) demonstrate Lamoree’s preoccupation

with moral decay. His nightmare painting, Echo from the Future, is a vision of a world death-ridden that is barren, without promise. In this future, men, women and children are mere shades of a past existence, which prompting our curiosity about the cause of this desolation.

Madonna of the Laptop subverts the traditional Virgin and Child portrait by placing the subjects in a sterile landscape and representing the Christ Child as a computer. The image of a golden halo appears on the computer’s screen. The halo, traditional in Western Art, is typically a circular aura of

light appearing behind the head of a divine or holy person. Here, though, holiness is not easily understood, or clearly ascribed; the viewer is given nothing but uncertainties, surrounded by a grim and uncertain landscape. Surrealism of this kind prompts what can perhaps be understood as a Surrealist moment: a feeling of being unmoored, cast adrift from solid ground.

Lamoree’s approach has consistently balanced the Surrealist penchant for disquieting, verisimilitudinous dreaming with his own anxious observations about sociopolitical matters.

Therefore, it would be more accurate to place Lamoree’s art in the subcategory of Social Surrealism. Sunday Morning at the Met (2000) for example, suggests the blindness of the art establishment; Spiritual Lollipop (1999), the spiritual vacuity of organized religion; Post Apocalyptic Parade (1996), the Pyrrhic victory of a nuclear war; and Academia (2000) the educational establishment’s assembly line production of soulless conformists. Lamoree’s style straddles the more familiar Surrealist

vocabulary that includes forbidding landscapes and anonymous, biomorphic and macabre figures with the overt social criticism more often associated with artists outside of the Surrealist movement, such as the Social Realist Ben Shahn and contemporary artist Barbara Kruger. Art historian Michael Tomor

observes about Shahn, "Social commentary often materialized in his paintings as allegory."3 Barbara

Kruger confronts the viewer with unsettling slogans juxtaposed to images culled from magazines,

movies, posters and other forms of popular culture. Her subversive transformations catch the viewer’s

eye with slogans that allude to physical and emotional violations. Interestingly, Lamoree also

addresses contemporary controversial issues, but he chooses the Surrealist idiom, the movement

famous for its playful use of obfuscation, mystery and fantasy.

Graziella Marchicelli, Ph.D.

Fine Arts Curator

As an artist I am not attempting to create beauty. I am interested in creating a visualization of my

feelings and observations concerning life’s conditions such as, ecological pollution, religion, and

political injustice. I have endeavored to create thought-provoking works of art.

I have long felt we live in a thoughtless, uncaring society. However, I was unable to conceive a way

of representing it. Then I moved to the suburbs and began commuting to the city. And there they were!

Figures cloaked in black with their black umbrellas and black briefcases. I had my symbolism.

The figures are visually and spiritually hollow. They are stylized. To give them individual character

traits would be to relieve them of the mundane quality they possess. They are headless symbolizing a

non-thinking society. They may be seen alone or congregating in groups. However, they remain cold and

aloof. There is no expression of warmth, instead an intense finality. The umbrella that they carry is to them

as a blanket is to infants – security that protects them from acknowledging their own actions.

Disenchantment with the critical state of the environment and man’s non-sympathetic relation to his

fellow man is evident in my canvasses where one observes a lonely, impersonal terrain populated by

somnambulistic figures wandering aimlessly en-route to their ultimate futility, death, not of the body but

of the spirit.

We have become a society reduced to numbers and symbols rather than the personal touch of names.

As such, we are losing our identity. Numbers come first; names last, if at all. We are on a path of

self-destruction. My hope is that we realize what we are doing before it is too late. At this point what has

thoughtlessly been done may still be rectified. We will not always have that opportunity.

Clifford W. Lamoree

Endnotes

1 A.M. Hammacher, Rene Magritte, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995): 18.

2 Ibid., 18.

3 Michael Tomor, Ph.D., Magic Realism, (Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, 1999): 4.

Image credits, top to bottom:

Clifford Lamoree (American, b. 1937)

Rush Hour, 2001 and Umbrella Figure, 2002

Rush Hour, Oil on Canvas, 36" x 94"

Collection of the artist

Umbrella Figure, Powder-coated, laser-cut steel, 80" x 38" x 3

Collection of the artist

Echo from the Future, 2001

Oil on Canvas, 56" x 70"

Collection of the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art

Post Apocalyptic Parade, 1996

Oil on canvas, 56" x 70"

Gift of the artist

Collection of Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art

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