January 17 - February 14, 2025
UNC Asheville’s juried international exhibition, Drawing Discourse, will open with a special event on January 17, 2025 featuring Juror, Laurie Lipton. The exhibition features 57 works of contemporary drawing selected from 1033 submissions by 322 artists in 5 nations.
Lipton will provide a lecture about her practice from 5-6 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025 in the Mullen & James Humanities Hall on the UNC Asheville campus. Laurie Lipton was born in New York in 1953 and began drawing at the age of four. She was the first person to graduate from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania with a Fine Arts Degree in Drawing (with honours). She has lived in Holland, Belgium, Germany, France, London and moved back to the USA after 36 years abroad. She currently resides in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA. Lipton was inspired by the religious paintings of the Flemish School. She tried to teach herself how to paint in the style of the 16th century Dutch Masters and failed. When traveling around Europe as a student, she 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.” “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. Black and white ached. "I realised that it was perfect for the imagery in my work. When people see my drawings in real life, as opposed to online, they are astonished by the amount of work in them. They require your complete attention. You need to come close and examine every crazy detailed inch of every intricate piece to get the full WOW effect.”
Additional programming includes a collaboration with Suggested Donation Podcast which will host a special drawing edition with guest artist, Michael Grimaldi. Zoom studio visits associated with the exhibition will be forthcoming and announced here on our website. A closing visiting artist lecture by Kathleen Thum will round out this year's programming. Please join us for these events, all are free and open to the public.
For more information, email exhibit Coordinator, Tamie Beldue, UNC Asheville Professor and Department Chair, at tbeldue@unca.edu.
Exhibiting Artists:
Amy Arnold
Jimmie Arroyo
Grant Barbour
Kelley Berg
Enid Blechman
Jessica Burke
Lilliana Cameron
Candice Chovanec
Bob Conge
Kelli Connell
Katherine Cox
Steven Cozart
Jacob Crook
Christopher Curtis
Susan Deaton
John Dempsey
Elizabeth DillmanErin Dixon
Kiki Farish
Alexandra Sophia Franz
Steve Gavenas
Cyrus Glance
Linda Hancock
Madeline Hernandez
Alma Hoffmann
Ming Ying Hong
Kathryn Jill Johnson
Rebecca Kautz
Randi Matushevitz
Larry McFall
Elizabeth McFalls
Matthew McHugh
Joseph MillerOrocoro
Anthony Pressler
Elena Peteva
Ann Piper
Gail Postal
Jean Schmitt
J. Michael Simpson
Catherine Eaton Skinner
Jerry Smith
Kristin Street
Patrick Summer
Margery Thomas-Mueller
John Thrasher
Kathleen Thum
Julia Townsend
Johanna Winters
Caomin Xie
