Beth Lipman
American
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1971 - )
Beth Lipman’s spontaneous and expressive process with both glass and photography results in works of art that capture transitory moments caught between growth and decay and stand as timeless portraits of humanity.(1) Going far beyond mere glass blowing, this extraordinary artist creates beautifully intricate sculptures that allude to early examples of seventeenth-century Baroque still lifes—specifically the Dutch Haarlem style of traditional laid tables. Instead of using paint, Lipman (American, born 1971) forms large-scale, three-dimensional interpretations in glittering glass, each composed of a multitude of individually handcrafted objects. Augmenting these works are stunning photographs that reduce her glass objects to two-dimensions, powerfully conveying her messages of desire and consumption, religious and political symbolism, and the transience of life, all through a different medium. In each piece, whether sculpturally or photographically, Lipman masterfully capitalizes on the properties of clear glass that render her objects simultaneously attainable and hard to discern. In these compositions, a tension arises between the past (once) and the present (again) as Lipman simultaneously references historical still-life paintings while addressing contemporary issues Each of Lipman’s spectacular, ghostly still lifes overflows with unique objects created with varied techniques such as blown, lamp-worked, solid-sculpted, and kiln-formed glass. She enjoys the physicality of the process of working in glass, in particular, the sense of urgency and intense focus required to shape the quickly shifting and cooling material. In addition she uses each technical method as a vehicle to express messages. The essential and contrasting nature of glass inspires Lipman; she explains that the medium is “an inherently fragile material to work with; it breaks, shatters, it has imperfections. It is essentially a parallel to the life cycle in many ways.” Still lifes, as a genre, date to Antiquity. During the Baroque period (1600–1725), they became immensely popular as master painters from France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain began realistically rendering discrete assemblages of objects such as flowers, fish, game, and household vessels. Each artist used the composition in an attempt to draw the viewer into the scene. Those images that featured charming naturalistic settings filled with familiar objects appealed to a wide audience, those that detailed scenes of more refined and luxurious items associated with nobility attracted wealthy and aristocratic admirers, and those with religious symbols that communicated scriptural messages or evoked a sense of reverence found favor among the devout. In each case these aesthetically beautiful paintings also conveyed messages criticizing portions of society. For example, in laid table still lifes, the overabundance of food, in particular specialties or hard to find fruits or other delicacies, referenced the power of wealth while simultaneously alluding to the perils of excess and gluttony that riches allowed. While much of her work is grounded in these seventeenth-century still lifes, Lipman created her first tabletop sculpture in response to the painting "Still Life with Fruit," ca. 1860, by German-American artist Severin Roesen (1816 to ca. 1872). In 1999, spurred by an invitation from artist, critic, and independent curator John Perreault to create a piece for a group exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, Lipman researched the Museum collection and found inspiration in Roesen’s painting. The luscious portrayals of abundance in Roesen’s canvas and those of his seventeenth-century predecessors set Lipman on her career path. As she explains, the “power of these images appealed to me in their depiction of wealth, that they portrayed objects of desirability that I could not consume at that time.” Recreating opulent and extravagant still lifes in glass allowed her to examine her own longings for material goods beyond her reach. Lipman also found parallels between the excessive consumerism depicted in the paintings from the Dutch Golden Age and the wastefulness that exists in modern-day America. Created between 1999 and 2004, her early glass still lifes depict excess and examine the perfection of objects, and allowed Lipman to explore how art can address political, social, and theological themes. The artist builds some of her assemblages intuitively, others stem from her penchant for research. She has investigated the still-life genre and drawn inspiration from a variety of sources, including such diverse subjects as food and geological time. Although her research is embedded in her processes, she explains, “Every laid table is not based on specific research; …[my] practice is more about a drawing exercise to a certain extent. It is a very formal exploration of line, form, texture, visual weight, the vocabulary of the still life, and of art. It is both an intuitive and formal exercise.” By grounding herself in the practice of a traditionally underappreciated genre—still life—Lipman repeatedly uses history as a tool to understand where she, as a person and an artist, fits. Lipman’s many sculptural installations metaphorically return the two-dimensional painted still lifes to their three-dimensional forms, but in the process she consciously transforms them from an imitation to an echo of nature. She strips the objects of color and specific details, using only shapes and textures to capture their essence. These qualities, in combination with the reflection and refraction of light on and within the glass, cause the eye to question what it sees. As she puts it, “I really enjoy how the clear glass frustrates your eye. You can see it, but you’re also seeing through it. It’s visually unattainable. And that kind of frustration is something that is so important to my work.” Because she considers color decorative, Lipman only uses clear, white, and black glass in her sculptures. The first two can signify something ghostly, something in the past, or even death; the third she uses to conjure up notions of nineteenth-century mourning culture and silhouettes—subjects that intrigue the artist. Lipman also responds aesthetically to the solid appearance and heightened reflectivity of the black glass. Conversely, Lipman uses clear glass to suggest, “things you know intimately in your own memory.” She strives to create something universal that allows her viewers to “see ourselves in others.” Over time Lipman’s approach to creating still lifes has shifted and matured. In the first five years of working she selected specific still-life paintings and responded to each one three-dimensionally—much as she did with Severin Roesen’s painting. Beginning in 2005, she started creating compositions that alluded to the still-life genre rather than referenced a specific painting. She focused on types of objects that have relevance today much as they did in the seventeenth century: fruits, vines, birds, vases, goblets, and other markers of human existence. These pieces dealt with consumerism, prosperity, wealth, and gluttony displayed by an excess of items as in "Laid Table with Fish" and "Broken Chalice with Flute." Next, Lipman began composing pieces to explore the relationship between objects and symbols. A new direction emerged in her work in 2010 when she started to incorporate elements that convey a generalized portrait of individuals or of society as a whole. These shifts were never abrupt or final, as she has freely revisited or blended these categories when it suits the project at hand. In 2010, Lipman collaborated with Ingalena Klenell (Swedish, born 1949), to create "Glimmering Gone," which brought about a sea change in her work. This large-scale, three-part work included a room-sized installation of sculpted and fused glass inspired by the landscape paintings of Abby Williams Hill (American, 1861–1943). Each artist worked on individual elements—including trees, clouds, and mountain ranges—in her respective studio and composed the piece together on site. Excited by this endeavor, Lipman, at the completion of "Glimmering Gone," began incorporating aspects of the landscape into her still lifes to explore ideas of how humans fail in their attempts to tame both nature and the landscape. This led her to include kudzu vines in several sculptures including "Pitcher with Vine." Initially introduced to the United States in the 1870s, kudzu later became popular as fodder for farm animals, for its ornamental qualities, and for its ability to slow soil erosion, the last heavily promoted by the United States Soil Conservation Service in the 1930s.(2) Since that time, this incredibly invasive vine has wiped out huge swaths of flora in the South despite efforts to control it during the last half century. Lipman first noticed kudzu during a trip to teach at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina in 2003 and became captivated. In her extensive research, she found that in the Far East kudzu had a medicinal history of curbing excessive food and alcohol consumption. That kudzu embodies this duality—both destructive and healing—intrigued the artist and compelled her to represent it in her sculpture. By incorporating images of overabundant and all-consuming kudzu vine as a symbol of excess in nature, Lipman drew parallels with the surfeit of materiality in our culture. Continuing to push her work in new directions, Lipman began adding a human presence in her work starting in 2010. As art historian Jules Prown once noted, “Human presence, is . . . implicit in any still life, even in a crumpled napkin that retains a gesture. A lute connotes the musician, a book the writer or scholar. However subtle, human presence is akin to other active forces in ‘still’ life’s interplay between the animate and the inanimate, the moving and the motionless, the quick and the dead.”(3) Lipman went further than merely alluding to the traces people leave behind; objects became proxies for individuals in her two "Whatnot" installations, both 2010, and in "One and Others," 2011. She added another dimension when she turned to photography as a method of presenting her ideas in 2007. After viewing some images of her sculptures taken for documentary purposes Lipman began to see the work anew. She believed that through this medium she could advance her conceptual ideas more strongly, as viewers had too often responded to the materiality of the beautiful glass in her sculptures rather than reflecting on her artistic motivations and thematic concerns. By returning a three-dimensional still life to a two-dimensional format and working with a representation of an object rather then a physical one, Lipman directly referred to acts of painting and drawing. To accomplish this, Lipman arranged her glass objects into compositions for the camera’s lens. After capturing the image and making a limited number of prints (usually an edition of 3), she destroyed the original glass pieces. Consequently, each of these physical objects survives only through Lipman’s photograph of it. Presenting her glass sculptures through photography allowed Lipman to play with compositional ideas and produce images that suggest intimacy and spontaneity. For each image she scaled one of her glass objects to life-size, letting the camera distort the other elements, and employed dramatic lighting to create multiple shadows that make it difficult for a viewer to grasp the entirety of the sculpture either visually or tactilely. Initially, Lipman created photographs of clear glass objects set against a white background; these referenced her sculptural installations, as is the case with "Sticks, Pitcher, and Chain" and "Bottles and Flora," which resonate with sculptural works such as "Broken Chalice and Flute." In them, Lipman emphasized the translucency and ephemerality of objects that merge and blend with their background. Pushing this idea even further, she created "Hourglass with Shells and Coral" an image of black glass on a dark background. Conversely, when she used clear glass on a black background such as "Pocket Watch, Books, Skull, and Candles" and "Still Life with Plate of Cheese and Beer Stein," Lipman highlighted the starkness of the glass. In these, the objects express a sense of weight and gravity. To complement these rich still-life photographs, Lipman began a new series of color images titled "Alone and the Wilderness."(4) Produced during a 2014 residency in Alaska, at the Chulitna Lodge Wilderness Retreat on Lake Clark, these pieces mark a new direction in Lipman’s work. Emphasizing color within her photographs for the first time, Lipman placed her colorless hand-sculpted glass objects directly into the vibrant landscape; the vessels took on new life, becoming an amalgam of portraiture, landscape, and still life. By juxtaposing sculptures with the landscape—in effect, breakables placed directly on nature’s table—Lipman explored humankind’s conflicted relationship with both nature and the wilderness. These photographs are her interpretation of en plein air painting in which weather, light, and insects became active collaborators. Capturing all of these elements allowed her to construct enigmatic, dreamlike portraits of objects that interleave still-life traditions with elements of landscape painting.(5) Lipman continually pushes boundaries to express her ideas. She frees herself to explore concerns in different media and formats, expanding beyond still life to incorporate elements of portraiture and the landscape, to draw links between the past and the present. Finding inspiration in European master paintings, Lipman adapts and reinvigorates the genre to pointedly comment on issues relevant to today such as consumerism and excess. Her photographs in combination with her sumptuous sculptures reveal Lipman’s mastery of her visual vocabulary. She creates provocative and sophisticated works that transcend the glittering beauty of glass.
(1) This text is excerpted from the essay by Jennifer Jankauskas in Once & Again: Still Lifes by Beth Lipman, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL, 2015. Unless footnoted, all direct quotes or paraphrasing originate from conversations and interviews with the artist conducted by the author between December 2013 and July 20, 2015.
(2) This agency is now the National Resources Conservation Service. (3) Jules Prown as quoted in Anne W. Lowenthal, Ed., The Object as Subject: Studies in the Interpretation of Still Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 7.
(4) With the title of this series, Lipman pays homage to Richard Proenneke a naturalist whose writings and documentaries, including Alone in the Wilderness were an inspiration to the artist. Intimately familiar with Alaska, Proenneke lived near Twin Lakes for more than 30 years.
(5) All of the characteristics that create this dreamlike atmosphere are completely natural. Lipman did not use Photo-shop to enhance or change the images in any way.
J. Jankauskas
12.15.15
American
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1971 - )
Beth Lipman’s spontaneous and expressive process with both glass and photography results in works of art that capture transitory moments caught between growth and decay and stand as timeless portraits of humanity.(1) Going far beyond mere glass blowing, this extraordinary artist creates beautifully intricate sculptures that allude to early examples of seventeenth-century Baroque still lifes—specifically the Dutch Haarlem style of traditional laid tables. Instead of using paint, Lipman (American, born 1971) forms large-scale, three-dimensional interpretations in glittering glass, each composed of a multitude of individually handcrafted objects. Augmenting these works are stunning photographs that reduce her glass objects to two-dimensions, powerfully conveying her messages of desire and consumption, religious and political symbolism, and the transience of life, all through a different medium. In each piece, whether sculpturally or photographically, Lipman masterfully capitalizes on the properties of clear glass that render her objects simultaneously attainable and hard to discern. In these compositions, a tension arises between the past (once) and the present (again) as Lipman simultaneously references historical still-life paintings while addressing contemporary issues Each of Lipman’s spectacular, ghostly still lifes overflows with unique objects created with varied techniques such as blown, lamp-worked, solid-sculpted, and kiln-formed glass. She enjoys the physicality of the process of working in glass, in particular, the sense of urgency and intense focus required to shape the quickly shifting and cooling material. In addition she uses each technical method as a vehicle to express messages. The essential and contrasting nature of glass inspires Lipman; she explains that the medium is “an inherently fragile material to work with; it breaks, shatters, it has imperfections. It is essentially a parallel to the life cycle in many ways.” Still lifes, as a genre, date to Antiquity. During the Baroque period (1600–1725), they became immensely popular as master painters from France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain began realistically rendering discrete assemblages of objects such as flowers, fish, game, and household vessels. Each artist used the composition in an attempt to draw the viewer into the scene. Those images that featured charming naturalistic settings filled with familiar objects appealed to a wide audience, those that detailed scenes of more refined and luxurious items associated with nobility attracted wealthy and aristocratic admirers, and those with religious symbols that communicated scriptural messages or evoked a sense of reverence found favor among the devout. In each case these aesthetically beautiful paintings also conveyed messages criticizing portions of society. For example, in laid table still lifes, the overabundance of food, in particular specialties or hard to find fruits or other delicacies, referenced the power of wealth while simultaneously alluding to the perils of excess and gluttony that riches allowed. While much of her work is grounded in these seventeenth-century still lifes, Lipman created her first tabletop sculpture in response to the painting "Still Life with Fruit," ca. 1860, by German-American artist Severin Roesen (1816 to ca. 1872). In 1999, spurred by an invitation from artist, critic, and independent curator John Perreault to create a piece for a group exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, Lipman researched the Museum collection and found inspiration in Roesen’s painting. The luscious portrayals of abundance in Roesen’s canvas and those of his seventeenth-century predecessors set Lipman on her career path. As she explains, the “power of these images appealed to me in their depiction of wealth, that they portrayed objects of desirability that I could not consume at that time.” Recreating opulent and extravagant still lifes in glass allowed her to examine her own longings for material goods beyond her reach. Lipman also found parallels between the excessive consumerism depicted in the paintings from the Dutch Golden Age and the wastefulness that exists in modern-day America. Created between 1999 and 2004, her early glass still lifes depict excess and examine the perfection of objects, and allowed Lipman to explore how art can address political, social, and theological themes. The artist builds some of her assemblages intuitively, others stem from her penchant for research. She has investigated the still-life genre and drawn inspiration from a variety of sources, including such diverse subjects as food and geological time. Although her research is embedded in her processes, she explains, “Every laid table is not based on specific research; …[my] practice is more about a drawing exercise to a certain extent. It is a very formal exploration of line, form, texture, visual weight, the vocabulary of the still life, and of art. It is both an intuitive and formal exercise.” By grounding herself in the practice of a traditionally underappreciated genre—still life—Lipman repeatedly uses history as a tool to understand where she, as a person and an artist, fits. Lipman’s many sculptural installations metaphorically return the two-dimensional painted still lifes to their three-dimensional forms, but in the process she consciously transforms them from an imitation to an echo of nature. She strips the objects of color and specific details, using only shapes and textures to capture their essence. These qualities, in combination with the reflection and refraction of light on and within the glass, cause the eye to question what it sees. As she puts it, “I really enjoy how the clear glass frustrates your eye. You can see it, but you’re also seeing through it. It’s visually unattainable. And that kind of frustration is something that is so important to my work.” Because she considers color decorative, Lipman only uses clear, white, and black glass in her sculptures. The first two can signify something ghostly, something in the past, or even death; the third she uses to conjure up notions of nineteenth-century mourning culture and silhouettes—subjects that intrigue the artist. Lipman also responds aesthetically to the solid appearance and heightened reflectivity of the black glass. Conversely, Lipman uses clear glass to suggest, “things you know intimately in your own memory.” She strives to create something universal that allows her viewers to “see ourselves in others.” Over time Lipman’s approach to creating still lifes has shifted and matured. In the first five years of working she selected specific still-life paintings and responded to each one three-dimensionally—much as she did with Severin Roesen’s painting. Beginning in 2005, she started creating compositions that alluded to the still-life genre rather than referenced a specific painting. She focused on types of objects that have relevance today much as they did in the seventeenth century: fruits, vines, birds, vases, goblets, and other markers of human existence. These pieces dealt with consumerism, prosperity, wealth, and gluttony displayed by an excess of items as in "Laid Table with Fish" and "Broken Chalice with Flute." Next, Lipman began composing pieces to explore the relationship between objects and symbols. A new direction emerged in her work in 2010 when she started to incorporate elements that convey a generalized portrait of individuals or of society as a whole. These shifts were never abrupt or final, as she has freely revisited or blended these categories when it suits the project at hand. In 2010, Lipman collaborated with Ingalena Klenell (Swedish, born 1949), to create "Glimmering Gone," which brought about a sea change in her work. This large-scale, three-part work included a room-sized installation of sculpted and fused glass inspired by the landscape paintings of Abby Williams Hill (American, 1861–1943). Each artist worked on individual elements—including trees, clouds, and mountain ranges—in her respective studio and composed the piece together on site. Excited by this endeavor, Lipman, at the completion of "Glimmering Gone," began incorporating aspects of the landscape into her still lifes to explore ideas of how humans fail in their attempts to tame both nature and the landscape. This led her to include kudzu vines in several sculptures including "Pitcher with Vine." Initially introduced to the United States in the 1870s, kudzu later became popular as fodder for farm animals, for its ornamental qualities, and for its ability to slow soil erosion, the last heavily promoted by the United States Soil Conservation Service in the 1930s.(2) Since that time, this incredibly invasive vine has wiped out huge swaths of flora in the South despite efforts to control it during the last half century. Lipman first noticed kudzu during a trip to teach at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina in 2003 and became captivated. In her extensive research, she found that in the Far East kudzu had a medicinal history of curbing excessive food and alcohol consumption. That kudzu embodies this duality—both destructive and healing—intrigued the artist and compelled her to represent it in her sculpture. By incorporating images of overabundant and all-consuming kudzu vine as a symbol of excess in nature, Lipman drew parallels with the surfeit of materiality in our culture. Continuing to push her work in new directions, Lipman began adding a human presence in her work starting in 2010. As art historian Jules Prown once noted, “Human presence, is . . . implicit in any still life, even in a crumpled napkin that retains a gesture. A lute connotes the musician, a book the writer or scholar. However subtle, human presence is akin to other active forces in ‘still’ life’s interplay between the animate and the inanimate, the moving and the motionless, the quick and the dead.”(3) Lipman went further than merely alluding to the traces people leave behind; objects became proxies for individuals in her two "Whatnot" installations, both 2010, and in "One and Others," 2011. She added another dimension when she turned to photography as a method of presenting her ideas in 2007. After viewing some images of her sculptures taken for documentary purposes Lipman began to see the work anew. She believed that through this medium she could advance her conceptual ideas more strongly, as viewers had too often responded to the materiality of the beautiful glass in her sculptures rather than reflecting on her artistic motivations and thematic concerns. By returning a three-dimensional still life to a two-dimensional format and working with a representation of an object rather then a physical one, Lipman directly referred to acts of painting and drawing. To accomplish this, Lipman arranged her glass objects into compositions for the camera’s lens. After capturing the image and making a limited number of prints (usually an edition of 3), she destroyed the original glass pieces. Consequently, each of these physical objects survives only through Lipman’s photograph of it. Presenting her glass sculptures through photography allowed Lipman to play with compositional ideas and produce images that suggest intimacy and spontaneity. For each image she scaled one of her glass objects to life-size, letting the camera distort the other elements, and employed dramatic lighting to create multiple shadows that make it difficult for a viewer to grasp the entirety of the sculpture either visually or tactilely. Initially, Lipman created photographs of clear glass objects set against a white background; these referenced her sculptural installations, as is the case with "Sticks, Pitcher, and Chain" and "Bottles and Flora," which resonate with sculptural works such as "Broken Chalice and Flute." In them, Lipman emphasized the translucency and ephemerality of objects that merge and blend with their background. Pushing this idea even further, she created "Hourglass with Shells and Coral" an image of black glass on a dark background. Conversely, when she used clear glass on a black background such as "Pocket Watch, Books, Skull, and Candles" and "Still Life with Plate of Cheese and Beer Stein," Lipman highlighted the starkness of the glass. In these, the objects express a sense of weight and gravity. To complement these rich still-life photographs, Lipman began a new series of color images titled "Alone and the Wilderness."(4) Produced during a 2014 residency in Alaska, at the Chulitna Lodge Wilderness Retreat on Lake Clark, these pieces mark a new direction in Lipman’s work. Emphasizing color within her photographs for the first time, Lipman placed her colorless hand-sculpted glass objects directly into the vibrant landscape; the vessels took on new life, becoming an amalgam of portraiture, landscape, and still life. By juxtaposing sculptures with the landscape—in effect, breakables placed directly on nature’s table—Lipman explored humankind’s conflicted relationship with both nature and the wilderness. These photographs are her interpretation of en plein air painting in which weather, light, and insects became active collaborators. Capturing all of these elements allowed her to construct enigmatic, dreamlike portraits of objects that interleave still-life traditions with elements of landscape painting.(5) Lipman continually pushes boundaries to express her ideas. She frees herself to explore concerns in different media and formats, expanding beyond still life to incorporate elements of portraiture and the landscape, to draw links between the past and the present. Finding inspiration in European master paintings, Lipman adapts and reinvigorates the genre to pointedly comment on issues relevant to today such as consumerism and excess. Her photographs in combination with her sumptuous sculptures reveal Lipman’s mastery of her visual vocabulary. She creates provocative and sophisticated works that transcend the glittering beauty of glass.
(1) This text is excerpted from the essay by Jennifer Jankauskas in Once & Again: Still Lifes by Beth Lipman, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL, 2015. Unless footnoted, all direct quotes or paraphrasing originate from conversations and interviews with the artist conducted by the author between December 2013 and July 20, 2015.
(2) This agency is now the National Resources Conservation Service. (3) Jules Prown as quoted in Anne W. Lowenthal, Ed., The Object as Subject: Studies in the Interpretation of Still Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 7.
(4) With the title of this series, Lipman pays homage to Richard Proenneke a naturalist whose writings and documentaries, including Alone in the Wilderness were an inspiration to the artist. Intimately familiar with Alaska, Proenneke lived near Twin Lakes for more than 30 years.
(5) All of the characteristics that create this dreamlike atmosphere are completely natural. Lipman did not use Photo-shop to enhance or change the images in any way.
J. Jankauskas
12.15.15
Artist Objects
