Laurie Lipton’s paintings have baffled and fascinated audiences for decades. Each piece plays with a cacophony of influences and experiences in a dreamlike vision. When she talks about her work, whether it’s from the 1980s or from recent months, Lipton gives viewers specific explanations. “Everything I see, read, feel, think, hear… comes into my brain and into the image through my left hand,” she said. “To me, it’s a strange, unexplainable alchemy.”
The New York-born artist first picked up a pencil at age four, and she’s been drawing ever since. This path led her to become the first person to graduate from Carnegie Mellon University with a fine arts degree in painting. So it’s difficult for Lipton to answer the question of how her work has evolved over the years of shows and breakthroughs. “I’ve been focusing on painting for more than half a century, so the evolution of my work is difficult to package into a neat progression,” she said. “Let’s put it this way, the more I draw, the better I get. It’s like practicing an instrument every day for years: after a while, you can play almost anything. However, I don’t like to settle for the status quo and challenge myself with each new piece. It keeps me alert and focused. I never want to ‘sleepwalk’ through a painting.”
Lipton was encouraged to pursue abstract and conceptual work in school. Yet despite being told that figurative art was centuries behind, Lipton found refuge in the work of Flemish painters Jan van Eyck, Francisco Goya and black-and-white photographer Diane Arbus. After graduation, Lipton spent the next thirty-six years living and working abroad. She lands and lives in Los Angeles today, but still looks back on her time in the Netherlands, England, Belgium, France and Germany as a formative influence in “an alchemy that’s hard to explain.”
