Love Bite: Laurie Lipton and Her Disturbing Black & White Drawings Directed, Edited & Filmed by James Scott
Today when most contemporary art is just decorative and is nothing more than commodities without meaning, art without soul and without substance, artists like Laurie Lipton have to be required.
We all know many artists who could fit into that decorative art that says nothing but whom is buying for people because they have enough money to do it and thus be able to say a lot about their and theirs success. Laurie Lipton is the opposite, her art is something to trigger within you the things you may not have thought about, the things you’re frightened of, the things you don’t want to talk about , I'm sure most people would not want to hang one of his works in their homes.
I came across the artwork of Laurie Lipton not so many years ago, I was living here in London and I remember that it had an enormous impact on me, I remember spending the next few days looking for most of the artwork and information about her that was on the internet, I even bought a couple of books of her artwork. His drawings are disturbing and terrifying at the same time, they make us reflect on individualism and the human condition in this consumer society and the acceptance of individual success as the only goal to achieve.
The other day I saw the documentary "Love Bite: Laurie Lipton and Her Disturbing Black & White Drawings" and I thought it was a great documentary that brings you very close to her as an artist and her motivations to continue drawing.
I highly recommend watching
Love Bite: Laurie Lipton and Her Disturbing Black & White Drawings
Directed, Edited & Filmed by James Scott
"No one on the planet has drawn more than Laurie Lipton. With millions of tiny strokes of her humble pencil, Laurie’s haunted images seek answers to some of the most uncomfortable themes in our culture. But what compels her to live a life of isolation drawing is neither black nor white."
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, 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 I had never 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.”
Some of her latest drawings from the series "Post Truth" and “Techno Rococo"
“Meeting” Laurie Lipton 2020
“Followers” Laurie Lipton 2020
“Left Hanging” Laurie Lipton 2020
“Blinds” Laurie Lipton 2020
“Binge Watching” Laurie Lipton 2018
“I’m Fine, Thanks” Laurie Lipton 2018
“Mouthpiece” Laurie Lipton 2017
“Post Truth” Laurie Lipton 2017
“Personal Effects” Laurie Lipton 2016
“Virtual Reality” Laurie Lipton 2015
“Happy” Laurie Lipton 2015
“The Decline Of Memory” Laurie Lipton 2020
“Ossified” Laurie Lipton 2019
Drawing “Ossified” Laurie Lipton 2019
“Newsfeed” Laurie Lipton 2019
“My Social Media” Laurie Lipton 2019
“Alone In A Room, Socializing” Laurie Lipton 2018
“Messaging” Laurie Lipton 2018
“Default Setting” Laurie Lipton 2016
“Likes” Laurie Lipton 2017
“Selfie” Laurie Lipton 2017
“Cooked” Laurie Lipton 2015
“Wired” Laurie Lipton 2013
You can find more of her artwork here https://www.laurielipton.com/
Hope you like it as much as I do
