Laurie Lipton

When traveling around Europe as a student, Laurie Lipton began developing her very own peculiar drawing technique building up tone with thousands of fine cross-hatching lines like an egg tempera painting. “It’s an insane way to draw,” she says, “but the resulting detail and luminosity is worth the amount of effort. My drawings take longer to create than a painting of equal size and detail.” 

“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.” 

“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: to create something no one had ever seen before, something that was brewing in the back of my brain. What I wanted fell between ‘isms.’ It wasn’t ‘surreal,’ it wasn’t ‘real’… it was lurking between the two”…

http://bit.ly/1ksDMDD 

Severed Hand

Una mano cosida a un tobillo. Parece obra de algún artista gore. Pero no, fué solo haciendo esto que se logró que la mano llegara “viva” a un hospital en China, 7 horas después de que el paciente (Xiao Wei) la perdió en un accidente de trabajo. Maravillosmente disgusting…


When Xiao Wei’s right hand was severed in an industrial accident, doctors at a hospital in Changde, China, grafted it to his ankle. The blood supply from his ankle kept the hand alive and viable on the seven-hour journey to a larger hospital with better facilities, where it was removed a month later from his ankle and reattached to his wrist. It’s not clear whether he’ll regain the use of his hand, but doctors are hopeful…

http://bit.ly/18UWitL

Severed Hand

Rotten pizza

A friend of redditor BigBoppinBill forgot some pizzas in the oven for “a few weeks.” The result? A kind of glorious fungal jellyfish.

This calls to mind the timeless wisdom of the Jazz Butcher’s classic, loony, over-the-top song, Caroline Wheeler’s Birthday Present: “Do you know what happens when you leave a fish in an elevator?/You don’t?/Well, here’s a clue/Fish is biodegradable/Thta means it rots.”

… (i.imgur.com)
 (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

http://bit.ly/11yHClS

Typewriter Portrait

Sculptor Jeremy Mayer writes, “This is my latest project- a portrait commission. The client, Mark Pelzner, came to me with 3 typewriters bequeathed to him by his late father, Marvyn Pelzner. Mark wanted me to take those typewriters and make a likeness of his dad that would be mounted on a box which holds Marvyn’s ashes. There are some parts in the sculpture that came from other typewriters in my stash, but most of the parts are from Marvyn’s typewriters. The eyes, for example, are made from his Smith Corona desktop, the shoulders from his Underwood portable, and parts of the head were from his desktop Underwood No. 5.

"Marvyn was an Optometrist in the San Francisco Bay Area who was a big San Francisco Giants fan and a doting grandfather. Many thanks to the Pelzner family for coming to me to work on such a powerful and personal project. I feel very fortunate to have been entrusted to do this. As usual, I made this using only typewriter parts- no solder, no glue, no welding, no armature”…
 

http://bit.ly/104Nb9u