Laurie Lipton

Behind the smooth, almost photographic surfaces of Laurie Lipton’s pencil drawings lies a world of intricate detail. Inspired by the hyper-realistic paintings of the 15th-Century Flemish masters, she has developed an unique, decidedly painterly graphic technique using a permanent-point pencil in a way that mimics these artists’ endlessly patient application of egg-tempera paint. From thousands upon thousands of distinct, precise, cross-hatched pencil-strokes, she builds up rich, monochrome tones. ‘I see my pencils as “colours,”’ she writes, ‘with the “H” leads as cold and the “B” leads as warm.’ Lipton concedes that this painstaking approach ‘takes forever,’ adding that ‘no one in their right mind would have the patience to draw in this way, which is why it works for me so well.’

My mother and father had the normal reaction of Jewish parents and exclaimed ‘Genius!’ every time I showed them my work. They were extremely proud of me, and displayed my tortured, pain-filled masterpieces to dinner parties of friends and relations. The dinner guests would look at me—a pretty, beautifully-dressed, petite little sweetie—then look at my artwork, and slowly edge away.

I was accepted into one of the best universities to study Fine Art, but became disillusioned with what was on offer. It was the 1970s, and ‘doing your own thing’ was fashionable. If the assignment was a self-portrait, students would bring in rocks, broken mirrors, or slashed canvases, and explain why it was a self-portrait: talk art. I used to cut classes and hide in the library for hours copying Dürer, Goya, Memling and Bosch.

I only draw about the things that affect me deeply. Why bother spending so much time and effort on a piece if I'm not passionately involved? I want my work to dig into me, to be so subjective that it goes beyond itself and is able to affect other people. I am trying to be brutally honest with myself in order to communicate, to touch on a truth. It’s like an archeological dig deep down into the day to day.

The images above are details of drawings reproduced in a ‘press book’ (simply entitled Laurie Lipton) compiled by the artist’s agents in 2003. The quartet of details below were scanned from the catalogue of a 2005 exhibition of Lipton’s drawings on the subject of the Mexican Día de Muertos (‘Day of the Dead’). These books, together with a variety of limited-edition prints, are available for purchase from the artist’s official website, which also features a comprehensive gallery of her drawings.

I envied the Mexican approach [to death]. The dead were always with them, visiting annually, getting up to all kinds of mischief, a reason for celebration. Families gathered on graves, picknicking with the dead, whole villages turned up to give offerings to households in mourning, and tourists arrived by the busload from all over the world to party with the Mexicans and their ghosts. Death was incorporated into their lives and ‘normalized.’ In the profound words of a TV commercial: they made it a ‘totally organic experience.’

Mexicans embrace death in their culture, whereas my culture runs from it, screaming. We encourage youth, beauty and the illusion that we have all the time in the world and will never, ever end. We frantically face-lift, botox, throw vitamins, creams and money at death. Death only happens to other people. Only losers die. Skiulls always look like they’re laughing; maybe the joke is on us.

Each one of Lipton’s drawings can take weeks, or, in some cases, months to complete. Of the last image, below, she writes:

The lovely Lady Death appears frequently in Mexican folk art. This is my painstaking version. If I had painted this image, it would have taken me half the amount of time it took to draw. I had to draw around the white lace. It took eons. It nearly killed me, which would have been very appropriate.

The images above are all copyright © Laurie Lipton, and are reproduced here with permission: click on them to see them enlarged, and in full.

Palmer’s Sketchbook of 1824

Note, that when you go to Dulwich it is not enough on coming home to make recollections in which shall be united the scattered parts about those sweet fields into a sentimental Dulwich looking whole No But considering Dulwich as the gate into the world of vision one must try behind the hills to bring up a mystic glimmer like that which lights our dreams. And those same hills, (hard task) should give us promise that the country behind them is Paradise.[1]

English painter Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) was nineteen years old when he filled the pages of this sketchbook. These drawings belong to what is generally regarded as the most important period in Palmer’s career; a time that is marked by a revolt against the modern world and the art it produced. Writings and drawings from this period are relatively rare for the simple reason that Herbert, the artist’s son, misguidedly destroyed a great deal of them. ‘Knowing that no one would be able to make head or tail of what I burnt […] I wished to save it from a more humiliating fate […T]he fire lasted for days’[2].

*

A key influence on the young Palmer was English landscape painter John Linnell. Linnell exposed Palmer to the Northern European primitives and instilled in him a love of careful observation of nature, which shines through these pages.

[…] it pleased God to send Mr. Linnell as a good angel from Heaven to pluck me from the pit of modern art; and after struggling to get out for the space of a year and a half, I have just enough cleared my eyes from the slime of the pit to see what a miserable state I am now in.[3]

Through Linnell, Palmer met William Blake, whom he greatly admired and whose influence is evident in the sketchbook. Rather than the terrifying visionary, it is the Blake of the Pastorals of Virgil that left his mark on Palmer’s work.

*

The sketchbook contains detailed studies from nature, sketches for compositions and single figures, annotations on art, extracts from Milton and Fuseli, various notes and draft verses. All the drawings are executed in pen and ink, sometimes over pencil, occasionally highlighted in watercolour and even gold ink.

*

Palmer’s Sketchbook of 1824 was initially published by the William Blake Trust in 1962. A new edition in collaboration with Thames and Hudson on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the artist’s birth is the source of all the illustrations in this post. These images are all copyright © The William Blake Trust, and have been reproduced without permission, only for as long as no-one objects to their presence on this site.

1. Palmer, Samuel, Sketchbook of 1824, London 2005, p.81 ^
2. Grigson, Geoffrey, Samuel Palmer, the Visionary Years, London 1947 ^
3. Palmer, A.H., The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, London 1892 ^

Eisbergfreistadt

Exhibition news: Kahn & Selesnick’s latest project Eisbergfreistadt is currently on show at the Pepper Gallery, Boston, and will run there until June 9th.

Eisbergfreistadt documents the creation of this principality which is inspired by an actual incident in 1923, when a mammoth iceberg ran aground in the Baltic port of Lübeck, towering over the town and terrifying the populace. Many decided (not unreasonably) that the iceberg caps were melting and the apocalypse coming. This event inspired gloomy cafe songs and penny dreadfuls, even a deck of playing cards.

Many notgeld and inflationary currencies were issed for the Eisbergfreistadt. Manifestos were published, and posters put up declaring the state's new ideals, citizenship requirements, etc. Products started appearing: butter, lard, chocolate (of surprisingly high quality) etc, all stamped with the Eisbergfreistadt logo. Although the creation of the Eisbergfreistadt is an actual historical incident, it is not clear to what extent it actually existed.

Copies of the playing cards designed for the exhibition, four of which are shown above (the King of Birds, & One of Smokestacks; the One of Thorns, & King of Icebergs) can be purchased from the duo’s website. A booklet containing the same designs is also available. See also my previous entries about K&S’s Scotlandfuturebog and Apollo Prophecies projects, and last year’s brief mention of Eisbergfreistadt, here. These images are all copyright © Kahn & Selesnick, 2006-07, and are reproduced here with permission.

*

Arent van Bolten

I’d never heard the name Arent van Bolten until I saw this post at the excellent Monster Brains weblog, with an intriguing photograph of a grotesque bronze statuette, and a similarly weird engraving. My subsequent searches turned up very little useful information about this artist, except for some notices of exhibitions in which his work had been featured. I gathered that the catalogue of one such exhibition (Dawn of the Golden Age—Northern Netherlandish Art 1580-1620: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Dec. ’93 - Mar. ’94), contained some reproductions of van Bolten’s work (and a great deal else besides—this was supposedly one of the largest exhibitions ever staged in Holland), and I hastened to order a copy of it. The images that follow were scanned from its pages.

*

The known facts of van Bolten’s life and work are few. He was born at Zwolle ca. 1573. He is known to have been in Italy in 1596 and 1602. By 1603 he was back in his home-town, where he married one Birgitta Lantinck. The couple had eight children. He was a silversmith by profession. At some point he moved with his family from Zwolle to Leeuwarden, where he died, ca. 1633.

Van Bolten’s reputation, however, rests mainly on his drawings, and in particular on the album in the British Museum that bears the title “BOLTEN VAN SWOL/TEEKENINGE” The drawings range from ornament, objects in precious metals, grotesque figures and monsters, to figural scenes from the Bible and mythology, the Shrovetide carnival, the commedia dell’arte and peasant life.

*

This album was compiled by an unknown collector ca. 1637, who had the drawings numbered, and grouped into thematic sections. ‘Some of van Bolten’s drawings of monsters and fanciful animals bear a resemblance to those in the prints of Christoph Jamnitzer […] and Wendel Dietterlin the Younger.’ Several of the designs in the album had been ‘turned into meticulously-faithful prints’ and published in Paris (between 1604 and 1616) by a Flemish-born printseller named Pierre Firens. The four images above are examples of these engravings. The last of them combines two of van Bolten’s drawings (nos. 151 and 152 in the album, shown below), into a single composition, embellished with farting monkeys.

*

‘A number of fantastic bronze animals have been attributed to van Bolten on the basis of stylistic similarities to his designs known from the drawings and the prints.’ Four different models have been documented. At least ten examples of the birdlike creature (the first image below) are known. Some of them seem to have been designed as novelty lamps, where the wick (and the flame) would come out of the creature’s mouth. Another figurine, of which just a single example is recorded, depicts a monster with a reptile’s head, a bird’s body and legs, with snail-shells in place of wings. The second image below shows a statuette with the head of a buffalo, the body of a frog, with stylised wings in place of forelegs, and the hind legs of a hoofed animal. It is not known whether these bronzes were van Bolten’s own work, or whether they were modelled from his drawings, or the engraved copies thereof.

*

The present images are all scans from the catalogue Dawn of the Golden age—Northern Netherlandish Art 1580-1620, edited by Ger Luijten, Ariane van Suchtelen, Reinier Baarsen, Wouter Kloek and Marijn Schapelhouman, and published by the Rijksmuseum in association with Waanders Uitgevers, Zwolle, in 1993. The information I’ve quoted and paraphrased comes from Peter Fuhring’s outline biography of van Bolten, and from the same author’s individual catalogue entries about the artist’s work.

Crispin de Passe

Crispin de Passe (1564-1637), whose forename is also variously given as Crispijn, Crispiaen and Chrispyn, or Latinised as Crispinus or Crispianus, and whose surname as van de Passe, de Pas, Passeus, etc., was a prolific engraver and a successful printseller who worked variously in Antwerp, Aachen, Cologne and Utrecht. As Crispin’s eldest son Crispin became a noteworthy engraver too, he also goes by Crispijn I de Passe, or Crispin van de Pas the Elder… It wasn’t only Crispin jr. who followed in his father’s footsteps, so did his younger brothers Simon and William (whose work I’ve briefly mentioned here), and his sister Magdalena. The images that follow are scans of prints reproduced in two volumes about de Passe (Crispijn de Passe and His Progeny (1564-1670): A Century of Print Production; and Profit and Pleasure: Print Books by Crispijn de Passe), both by Ilja M. Veldman, and published in 2001 by Sound and Vision Publishers, Rotterdam.

*

Crispin was born at Arnemuiden on the island of Walcheren in Zeeland, but his family moved to Antwerp while he was still quite young. De Passe’s earliest known works date from 1584, and, later that year, or in ’85, he entered the rolls of the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke. It is not known with whom he studied, but his early style, according to Veldman, resembles that of the brothers Johannes and Hieronymus Wierix. Crispin’s fledgling career was greatly assisted by his marriage to Magdalena de Bock, a niece (by marriage) of the prolific painter and designer Martin de Vos—the great majority of de Passe’s early prints follow designs by de Vos. Antwerp, meanwhile, had literally been under siege. An agreement signed after the city’s surrender to the Spanish in ’85 gave Protestants an ultimatum: convert to Catholicism, or leave within four years. De Passe, a staunch and steadfast Mennonite, opted to depart.

*

In 1588 De Passe and his wife briefly settled in Aachen, which was where he first set up shop as an independent engraver and printselller, and where the first of his prints made after his own designs were published. The religious and political climate in Aachen was no more hospitable than it had been in occupied Antwerp, however, and, in 1589, Emperor Rudolf II. issued an edict expelling all heretics (in this instance, all Protestants) from the city. This time, De Passe moved to nearby Cologne, which, being another predominantly Catholic city, could not have been an ideal refuge either. Despite his marginal position as a refugee unable to claim citizenship, de Passe remained in Cologne for more than twenty years: his art and his business flourished alike, and his five children were all born there.

*

De Passe’s prints covered all manner of subjects. He engraved many biblical and other devotional scenes, not avoiding such specifically Catholic imagery as depictions of the virgin, and of the lives of the saints; he issued portrait prints of rulers, nobles, generals, scholars & other prominent figures; he executed many allegorical series of engravings on such themes as the seven virtues and vices, the seven planets, the seven ages of man, the five senses, the four elements, the four seasons and the four times of day; he produced illustrations of scenes from Homer, Ovid and Virgil; he designed a particularly fine set of emblem-engravings, those adorning Gabriel Rollenhaugen’s influential 1611 Nucleus emblematum selectissimorum…; and he issued albums of prints aimed at the students in Cologne’s university, juxtaposing straightforward depictions of varsity life with scenes intended to inspire moral reflection.

*

The present images are as follows: (i) a fisherman and his wife illustrating Water, from a series of ‘the four elements’ and (ii) Night from a quartet of prints on ‘the four times of day,’ in which a gentleman drinks a nightcap while his lady tries to persuade him to come to bed; (iii) and (iv) belong to a series of engravings after designs by Jacques Bellange, portraying Witticisms from Italian Comedies—in the first illicit love is traded for stolen money, and in the second, a aging husband is cuckolded by his young wife; (v) Young Man Snared by a Prostitute and (vi) Young Man Driven from a Brothel, although drawn from different series of engravings, could be construed as part of a single cautionary tale; (vii) shows us Shrovetide Games being played, while (viii) is a Visit to a Tavern.

*

Lastly, (ix) and (x), above, are a pendant pair of moralising prints: A Young Man Preferring a Sweetheart of his own Age to a Rich Old Woman and A Young Woman Preferring a Suitor of her Own Age to a Rich Old Man. Ironically, when de Passe was a wealthy old widower himself, his wife having died in 1635, he married (in ’36) a much younger woman. His children’s alarm at the implications for their inheritance resulted in months of legal negotiations, which had barely been resolved at de Passe’s death.