As soon as Sarah Lamb takes the fowl out of the freezer, the clock starts ticking. In a few days, the game—a tawny woodcock and a larger, gray-and-brown ruffed grouse—will start to smell…well, foul. That means Lamb has a limited time to perfectly position the birds against a backdrop in her Houston home studio and then paint a precise, detailed depiction of them on a stretched canvas. “I once had a turkey in my studio for seven days,” she recalls in her South Georgia brogue. “It got pretty gamy.”

She poses the woodcock and grouse upside down, their beaks pointing in opposite directions, against an old Charleston-green wooden shutter. Her studio is filled with a variety of such timeworn props—pedestals, boxes, doors—for her still lifes. Light coming in from the room’s tall, north-facing windows illuminates each brilliant, gleaming feather on the birds. The composition looks at once bright and moody. For Lamb, one of the most sought-after American realist painters working today, the race against time is part of the artistic thrill.

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