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The Drawings of Laurie Lipton
"The Drawings of Laurie Lipton" is a comprehensive survey of Lipton's fantastical, painstakingly detailed, hand-drawn images.
Featuring more than 70 works, this is the most conclusive and ambitious publication about the artist to date.
A conversation between Lipton and Begovich Gallery Director Mike McGee, offers insights into her personal history, motivations and creative process. Lipton's brief notes about several specific artworks offer further anecdotes and context.
Laurie Lipton was born in New York and began drawing at the age of four. She was the first person to graduate from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania with a Fine Arts Degree in Drawing (with honors). She has lived in Holland, Belgium, Germany, France, London and has recently moved back to the USA after 36 years abroad. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA.
Lipton was inspired by the religious paintings of the Flemish School. She tried to teach herself how to paint in the style of the 16th century Dutch Masters and failed. When traveling around Europe as a student, she began developing her very own peculiar drawing technique building up tone with thousands of fine cross-hatching lines like an egg tempera painting. "It's an insane way to draw", she says, "but the resulting detail and luminosity is worth the amount of effort. My drawings take longer to create than a painting of equal size and detail."
"It was all abstract and conceptual art when I attended university. My teachers told me that figurative art went "out" in the Middle Ages and that I should express myself using form and shapes, but splashes on canvas and rocks on the floor bored me. I knew what I to create something no one had ever seen before, something that was brewing in the back of my brain. What I wanted fell between "isms". It wasn't "surreal", it wasn't "real"... it was lurking between the two. I used to sit for hours in the library copying Durer, Memling, Van Eyck, Goya and Rembrandt. The photographer, Diane Arbus, was another of my inspirations. Her use of black and white hit me at the core of my Being. Black and white is the color of ancient photographs and old TV shows... it is the color of ghosts, longing, time passing, memory, and madness. Black and white ached. I realized that it was perfect for the imagery in my work."
Featuring more than 70 works, this is the most conclusive and ambitious publication about the artist to date.
A conversation between Lipton and Begovich Gallery Director Mike McGee, offers insights into her personal history, motivations and creative process. Lipton's brief notes about several specific artworks offer further anecdotes and context.
Laurie Lipton was born in New York and began drawing at the age of four. She was the first person to graduate from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania with a Fine Arts Degree in Drawing (with honors). She has lived in Holland, Belgium, Germany, France, London and has recently moved back to the USA after 36 years abroad. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA.
Lipton was inspired by the religious paintings of the Flemish School. She tried to teach herself how to paint in the style of the 16th century Dutch Masters and failed. When traveling around Europe as a student, she began developing her very own peculiar drawing technique building up tone with thousands of fine cross-hatching lines like an egg tempera painting. "It's an insane way to draw", she says, "but the resulting detail and luminosity is worth the amount of effort. My drawings take longer to create than a painting of equal size and detail."
"It was all abstract and conceptual art when I attended university. My teachers told me that figurative art went "out" in the Middle Ages and that I should express myself using form and shapes, but splashes on canvas and rocks on the floor bored me. I knew what I to create something no one had ever seen before, something that was brewing in the back of my brain. What I wanted fell between "isms". It wasn't "surreal", it wasn't "real"... it was lurking between the two. I used to sit for hours in the library copying Durer, Memling, Van Eyck, Goya and Rembrandt. The photographer, Diane Arbus, was another of my inspirations. Her use of black and white hit me at the core of my Being. Black and white is the color of ancient photographs and old TV shows... it is the color of ghosts, longing, time passing, memory, and madness. Black and white ached. I realized that it was perfect for the imagery in my work."
- GenresArt
160 pages, Hardcover
First published September 15, 2013
1 person is currently reading
34 people want to read
About the author
Laurie Lipton
7 books8 followersLaurie Lipton was born in New York and began drawing at the age of four. She was the first person to graduate from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania with a Fine Arts Degree in Drawing (with honors). She has lived in Holland, Belgium, Germany, France, the UK and has recently moved to Los Angeles after 36 years abroad. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA.
Lipton was inspired by the religious paintings of the Flemish School. She tried to teach herself how to paint in the style of the 16th century Dutch Masters and failed. When traveling around Europe as a student, she began developing her very own peculiar drawing technique building up tone with thousands of fine cross-hatching lines like an egg tempera painting. “It’s an insane way to draw”, she says, “but the resulting detail and luminosity is worth the amount of effort. My drawings take longer to create than a painting of equal size and detail.”
“It was all abstract and conceptual art when I attended university. My teachers told me that figurative art went ‘out’ in the Middle Ages and that I should express myself using form and shapes, but splashes on canvas and rocks on the floor bored me. I knew what I wanted: I wanted to create something no one had ever seen before, something that was brewing in the back of my brain. I used to sit for hours in the library copying Durer, Memling, Van Eyck, Goya and Rembrandt. The photographer, Diane Arbus, was another of my inspirations. Her use of black and white hit me at the core of my Being. Black and white is the color of ancient photographs and old TV shows… it is the color of ghosts, longing, time passing, memory, and madness. Black and white ached. I realized that it was perfect for the imagery in my work.”
Lipton was inspired by the religious paintings of the Flemish School. She tried to teach herself how to paint in the style of the 16th century Dutch Masters and failed. When traveling around Europe as a student, she began developing her very own peculiar drawing technique building up tone with thousands of fine cross-hatching lines like an egg tempera painting. “It’s an insane way to draw”, she says, “but the resulting detail and luminosity is worth the amount of effort. My drawings take longer to create than a painting of equal size and detail.”
“It was all abstract and conceptual art when I attended university. My teachers told me that figurative art went ‘out’ in the Middle Ages and that I should express myself using form and shapes, but splashes on canvas and rocks on the floor bored me. I knew what I wanted: I wanted to create something no one had ever seen before, something that was brewing in the back of my brain. I used to sit for hours in the library copying Durer, Memling, Van Eyck, Goya and Rembrandt. The photographer, Diane Arbus, was another of my inspirations. Her use of black and white hit me at the core of my Being. Black and white is the color of ancient photographs and old TV shows… it is the color of ghosts, longing, time passing, memory, and madness. Black and white ached. I realized that it was perfect for the imagery in my work.”
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 13, 2016
Eisnein's No.24 Favorite Artist/Artbook. Check Out No.25 Right HERE. Go Back to No.1 HERE.
No one does skeletons in lace like Laurie Lipton. Granted, it's not that common as far as bone-related subject-matter goes, but that's probably due to the insane intricacy required for the proper rendering of lace and spider webs and all that wispy shit. But she happens to specialize in insane intricacy.
Lipton candidly describes her experiences as a student in a prestigious art college during the early eighties, explaining that it was impossible to find an instructor on campus who would simply teach her how to fucking paint, a sad commentary on twentieth century ideas about painting as a dead medium (tampons in teacups? That's their forte). On the positive side, it left her wholly devoted to creating art with pencil and charcoal, and she's now on the forefront of a generation dedicated to the art of drawing -- if you think I'm making shit up, check out Tiny Pencil and Walk the Line: The Art of Drawing. It really is a thing. You'll find monochromatic kaleidoscopes of soft-grey Pop-surrealism and Neo-Symbolism; artists that slough off the convenience of digital paint with its unlimited toolbox, for the simplicity of carbon smeared on wood-pulp.
This book, published by Last Gasp, is a deluxe showcase that is even better than the long sold-out BeinART monograph; the book design is very nice, faux-leather and silver-embossed, with a square 10" x 10" format.
Featuring work from every stage of her career, it nevertheless focuses on her most recent drawings, large-scale compositions of absolutely stunning detail and complexity. I can't think of many artists attacking 2-dimensional surfaces with graphite and charcoal who possess Lipton's combination of imaginative brilliance and technical virtuosity -- Jim Woodring. Nick Sheehy. A couple others perhaps.
Grinning skeletons garbed in Victorian finery, wearing lace veils that are rendered with an intricacy painters would be hard-pressed to match, massive Gothic churches constructed entirely of bones, factories that devour their workers, endless turnabouts on which skeleton-driven bumper cars follow one another... her wonderfully morbid worldview is partly inspired by a strong set of moral and political beliefs, but whatever message there is in her art, it is usually executed with a wry sense of humor that keeps things from getting anywhere near dogmatic.
Like a tornado of sharpened pencils! This gives a good idea of the scale she's working at, and the amount of detail involved. Very few artists can match this level of intricacy, but there are a few: Manabu Ikeda, Akira Yamaguchi, the 3-D glass collages of Dustin Yellin, and the vitrine-tank dioramas of the Chapman Brothers 'Hell' series. She defines prolific; the number of works waiting to be collected could fill up three or four volumes like this one. Who needs paint?
Given how fast her last book sold out, there should be plenty of interest in this one; with its faux-leather cover trimmed with silver details and silver-embossed lettering, it looks amazing. Content-wise, it is very rich, with more than enough full-page artwork to justify the very reasonable price-tag, and plenty of text for background and analysis. I've found Last Gasp to be a great 'alternative' monograph publisher, using the highest quality materials but selling at prices well below other companies. The Drawings of Laurie Lipton is a great example. Ossuaries and cathedrals of human bone designed by Hawksmoor; apocalyptic nightmares of twisted old men smiling on streets that have become rivers of death; the animated skeletons of Lords and Ladies, dressed in moldering velvet and dusted with thousands of baby spiders. It's a beautiful thing.
P.S.: If you want to see the real ossuaries that inspired much of Lipton's imagery, check out:
Eisnein's No.24 Favorite Artist/Artbook. Check Out No.25 Right HERE. Go Back to No.1 HERE.
More Art-book Reviews
More Comic-book Reviews
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No one does skeletons in lace like Laurie Lipton. Granted, it's not that common as far as bone-related subject-matter goes, but that's probably due to the insane intricacy required for the proper rendering of lace and spider webs and all that wispy shit. But she happens to specialize in insane intricacy.
Lipton candidly describes her experiences as a student in a prestigious art college during the early eighties, explaining that it was impossible to find an instructor on campus who would simply teach her how to fucking paint, a sad commentary on twentieth century ideas about painting as a dead medium (tampons in teacups? That's their forte). On the positive side, it left her wholly devoted to creating art with pencil and charcoal, and she's now on the forefront of a generation dedicated to the art of drawing -- if you think I'm making shit up, check out Tiny Pencil and Walk the Line: The Art of Drawing. It really is a thing. You'll find monochromatic kaleidoscopes of soft-grey Pop-surrealism and Neo-Symbolism; artists that slough off the convenience of digital paint with its unlimited toolbox, for the simplicity of carbon smeared on wood-pulp.
This book, published by Last Gasp, is a deluxe showcase that is even better than the long sold-out BeinART monograph; the book design is very nice, faux-leather and silver-embossed, with a square 10" x 10" format.
Featuring work from every stage of her career, it nevertheless focuses on her most recent drawings, large-scale compositions of absolutely stunning detail and complexity. I can't think of many artists attacking 2-dimensional surfaces with graphite and charcoal who possess Lipton's combination of imaginative brilliance and technical virtuosity -- Jim Woodring. Nick Sheehy. A couple others perhaps.
Grinning skeletons garbed in Victorian finery, wearing lace veils that are rendered with an intricacy painters would be hard-pressed to match, massive Gothic churches constructed entirely of bones, factories that devour their workers, endless turnabouts on which skeleton-driven bumper cars follow one another... her wonderfully morbid worldview is partly inspired by a strong set of moral and political beliefs, but whatever message there is in her art, it is usually executed with a wry sense of humor that keeps things from getting anywhere near dogmatic.
Like a tornado of sharpened pencils! This gives a good idea of the scale she's working at, and the amount of detail involved. Very few artists can match this level of intricacy, but there are a few: Manabu Ikeda, Akira Yamaguchi, the 3-D glass collages of Dustin Yellin, and the vitrine-tank dioramas of the Chapman Brothers 'Hell' series. She defines prolific; the number of works waiting to be collected could fill up three or four volumes like this one. Who needs paint?
Given how fast her last book sold out, there should be plenty of interest in this one; with its faux-leather cover trimmed with silver details and silver-embossed lettering, it looks amazing. Content-wise, it is very rich, with more than enough full-page artwork to justify the very reasonable price-tag, and plenty of text for background and analysis. I've found Last Gasp to be a great 'alternative' monograph publisher, using the highest quality materials but selling at prices well below other companies. The Drawings of Laurie Lipton is a great example. Ossuaries and cathedrals of human bone designed by Hawksmoor; apocalyptic nightmares of twisted old men smiling on streets that have become rivers of death; the animated skeletons of Lords and Ladies, dressed in moldering velvet and dusted with thousands of baby spiders. It's a beautiful thing.
P.S.: If you want to see the real ossuaries that inspired much of Lipton's imagery, check out:
Eisnein's No.24 Favorite Artist/Artbook. Check Out No.25 Right HERE. Go Back to No.1 HERE.
More Art-book Reviews
More Comic-book Reviews
More Novel Reviews
March 3, 2023
I'm giving this 4 stars not because of Lipton's drawings (their hyperreal detail and intensity are a 10 on a 5-star scale), but because this book is just too small to appreciate the intricacies and the depth of the works it displays. Many of these drawings are large, and some are VERY large (upwards of 50"x40") - a few pages have detail images cropped alongside the original piece, but far too few, and far too random are the details which the editor has chosen to crop and enlarge. This book basically requires a magnifying glass, as it's not even 12"x12", and only a couple of the drawings are stretched beyond one page.
It's a shame, because the formatting does not do justice to the content.
It's a shame, because the formatting does not do justice to the content.
February 5, 2016
I was waiting for a long time to take an interview and they had this beutiful book instead of trashy magazines. I completely enjoyed it, specially the intricate and amazing lady skull with lace!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews