A collection of new, astounding drawings by artist Laurie Lipton.
Laurie Lipton draws on canvases that are improbably large, using only pencil and charcoal. The images she renders present our modern world in scathing critique.
The artwork is part of three ongoing series entitled Techno Rococo, Post Truth, and May You Live in Interesting Times.
In these she addresses social media, unchecked consumerism, intellectual decline, environmental catastrophe, and soul-crushing isolation, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Her sprawling phantasmagorias have earned her a broad constituency of fans and collectors, from scholars and aficionados of the Flemish and German Renaissance, to savvy contemporary gallerists and collectors, to filmmakers such as Terry Gilliam and James Scott (who directed the award-winning 2016 documentary about her, Love Bite) and finally to a massive and loyal social-media following.
Includes introductory essay “Laurie Lipton and the Golden Thread” by Richard Speer.
Laurie Lipton drawing
Hardcover • 9” x 11” •112 pages
ISBN 978-0-86719-888-1
Published by Last Gasp
“It’s an insane way to draw, 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.”
—Laurie Lipton
About the Author
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.”
