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
You can find more examples of Laurie Lipton's work here
Really nice to see this blog...
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