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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 honours). She has lived in Holland, Belgium, Germany and France and has made her home in London since 1986. 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 inspired me. 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 color for the imagery in my work."
"The Extraordinary Drawings of Laurie Lipton" is the first ever comprehensive book on Laurie Lipton and spans 30 years of art work and over 70 drawings. It can be ordered here: LAST GASP BOOKS: http://www.lastgasp.com/d/35309/
The internationally cool clothing store, ALL SAINTS, have started a new, exciting line of LIPTON TEES that can be ordered here: http://www.allsaints.com/womens/laurielipton . There is also a line of mens t-shirts in production, so keep checking the online store for the latest items.
"WEAPONS OF MASS DELUSIONS" opens at the Grand Central Art Center Museum in Santa Ana, California, and runs from May 1st till June 13th. "MACHINE PUNK" opens at La Luz de Jesus in Los Angeles on November 4th till Nov 28th. For more details on these, and other shows, please go to https://www.laurielipton.com/ and click on the NEWS section.
