The drawings of Laurie Lipton

This is one of my occasional posts on a particular artist whose work I feel should be highlighted. Laurie Lipton says this about her choice to focus on black and white drawing, “Black and white is the colour of memory, ghosts, and old TV shows”.

Her drawing technique is one whereby she builds up tone using thousands of fine cross-hatched lines. The surface of her large drawings is mesmerising, as you get closer if feels as if you are looking at a tapestry or delicate fabric, the hatched strokes both serve to link all her various images together and allow for the white of the paper surface to glow through her network of lines as if the drawings are lit from beneath.

She developed this technique after studying the way that egg tempera paintings were made and has made detailed copies of Durer, Memling, Van Eyck, Goya and Rembrandt. Once again an artist has learnt how to find herself by looking backwards in order to find a way forward. In some ways it is easier to find a personal way through contemporary practices by researching different aspects of historical practices because you are able to distance yourself from the work and it is easier to discover something that is personal to you, rather than something that is simply fashionable.

Detail

I don’t like all her work, I think some of it relies too much on the cliché of the skeleton or death mask to achieve melodramatic effect, but when she looks at the sinister effects associated with our now total reliance on technology, I think her work really hits the nail. Her dystopian images of machinery and the glow of artificial light, suggest that the wiring and cabling that carries the life of electricity into our homes, also carries something else; a threat to our future existence. Her reliance on painstaking hand crafted drawing, seems in itself an answer to these visions, if we are to survive a time when machines take over production, we may well have to revive traditional skills in order to give ourselves a future role to play.

Technically it is interesting to see how she sets herself up to draw. In order to make sure she doesn’t smudge her drawing as she works over the surface, she has devised a system whereby she can rest her hand on a wooden strut that she moves with her as she works across the surface.

Laurie Lipton working in her studio

This type of control is vital to any sort of drawing and in this case she has re-invented the old marl stick. The marl stick was used by artists such as Rembrandt to steady their hand as they painted and of course to make sure they didn’t smudge already recently painted areas. Yet another reason to research how people worked in the past, is to see how they solved problems that continue to be issues faced by artists today.

Artist using a marl stick

See also this post on working from old masters

A steady hand

You can find more examples of Laurie Lipton's work here