‘Death and the Maiden.’
 
Laurie Lipton has been drawing pictures since she was four years old. Her art serves as her “main means of communicating.”

When I sit down to draw a whole life time of experience comes into play…My imagery is the result of many associations, thoughts, feelings… I think in images…The creation process is the effort to communicate…not only to an “audience” but to myself. It serves an inner need. If I weren’t allowed to create, I believe I would become psychologically, perhaps even physically, ill.

Born in New York in 1953, Lipton was encouraged by her parents to develop her talents. She attended the Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania, where she became the first person to graduate with a Fine Arts Degree with honors in Drawing. Unfortunately, Conceptual Art was then all the rage and Lipton’s art teachers told her “figurative work went ‘out’ in the Middle Ages.” Lipton disagreed. She bucked the trend for what was then considered fashionable and decided to stick to her own ideas about art and what she should draw. She skipped class and taught herself drawing by studying art books in the college library on artists like Vermeer and Goya.

After graduation, Lipton traveled around Europe visiting museums trying to figure out how to paint. But this proved more difficult. Instead, she developed her own unique style of drawing where she uses a charcoal pencil to minutely layer each picture with thousands of tiny marks or lines which are slowly built up to create a far more luminous and rounded image. This process takes months to achieve. The incredible detail in each picture can only be truly appreciated at first hand or by taking a magnifying glass over the surface of the paper.

Lipton’s work is often labeled “surrealist.” It’s a term she eschews, preferring to see her work as closer to medieval religious painting where she has replaced the icons of Jesus and the Virgin Mary with iconography from the twentieth-century to tell her own personal story. More recently, this has included her response to the horrors of war, alienation caused by technology, and our “post-truth” world where everything washes over us like fiction and only the truly personal impinges on our reality. This has led to drawings such as Post Truth, Virtual Reality, and The Watchers. This last work, The Watchers, was inspired by the true story of a woman who was murdered in front of an apartment block, where not one of the occupants attempted to intervene to stop the killing or even contact the police—one resident turned up the volume on his television to drown out the victim’s screams. The picture opens like a double-door. The front shows a young girl peering through a set of blinds. Inside, the picture opens out to reveal the murder and the apartment block with its blind witnesses.

Lipton is a brilliant and extraordinarily talented artist and more of her work can be seen here.
 

‘Love Bite.’
 

‘Santa Muerte.’
 
More extraordinary drawings plus a documentary on Laurie Lipton, after the jump…
 

‘Stairs Prague.’
 
The artist Shinji Ogawa draws incredibly detailed and accurate representations of cities, buildings, landscapes, and people. His drawings may look like old photographs, they may even look like photo-shopped images, but they are in fact illustrations rendered in pencil and ink.

Ogawa’s intention is not to show how technically brilliant he is an artist but to create an alternate reality where well-known landmarks are often duplicated, replaced, or substituted with other buildings to create “a parallel universe.”

“In these works, identical objects are repeated many times, which never happens in reality,” he says. “It’s like a young person who will never meet himself when he’s older and that’s a paradox. It is forbidden for identical objects to exist and if they do the world of singularities that God created for his own game will be finished. I call this series Perfect World because such perfection duality is a paradox.”

Ogawa’s work suggests the idea that what we see is only one small aspect of reality, one “layer” of what is visible.

“One day I visited Shinshu district in Japan’s Nagano prefecture and the reality of the landscape overwhelmed me,” says Ogawa. “When I stood in a place surrounded by two mountains, I lost myself because there was too much information. The landscape consists of many layers and our perception of the landscape changes in unpredictable ways all the time. The landscape has no limit.”

Ogawa was born in Yamaguchi, Japan, in 1959. He studied art at the Mie University, graduating in 1983. Since then, he has exhibited his distinctive drawings in galleries and museums across Japan and Europe. He describes his work as “meta aesthetic” by which he hopes the viewer will “recognize that there are many tiny, mysterious matters in ordinary life and people can make themselves sublime by paying attention to them.”

See more Ogawa’s work here.
 

‘Rue Eau-de-Robec.’
 

‘Colisseum.’
 
See more of Ogawa’s incredible work, after the jump…

 
We can’t see their eyes. That’s what I find disturbing about artist Björn Griesbach’s series of portraits of smiling children. We can see their teeth—which are almost identical—but we can’t tell if these smiling kids are happy and genuine in their expressions or not.

It’s a case of smile over content.

Björn Griesbach is a German artist based in Hanover. He is best known for his startlingly original illustrations for those classic fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, his cover designs to books by Herman Hesse, and his drawings for an edition of Jean Paul-Sartre’s novel Nausea.

Griesbach’s series of superbly creepy portraits Hollow Children question our response to that near universal expression of happiness, pleasure, and friendliness—the smile.

Should we respond to the children’s smile reflexively? Or are we a tad disturbed that these eerie offspring have had their eyes smudged out and we can no longer connect with their expressions?

Scientists can’t fully explain why we smile—but they do know smiling generally makes us feel better.

A genuine smile involves the use of those muscles around our eyes. This is called a Duchenne smile after the French neurologist who first identified the two distinct forms of smiling. This smile that involves raising the eyes is a genuine smile.

The second type of smile which does not involve any eye movement is the fake smile—or “Pan Am smile,” so-called because of its use by air stewardesses to greet passengers on and off flights. These days it may be a bit more difficult to ascertain a genuine smile with all the botox injections paralysing any facial expression.

See more of Björn Griesbach’s work here.
 

 

 
More smile over content, after the jump…