Laurie Lipton’s meticulously rendered drawings are what nightmares are made of complete with skeleton kings, scary clowns, and ghostly reapers.
The artist on her work:
“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
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.”