Streaming for Free on Vimeo: James Scott's Doc 'Love Bite' on Macabre Artist Laurie Lipton

Lipton's black and white drawings strike with sinister, sardonic force: 'I made [Love Bite] to help share her work & philosophies to more humans'

In one of artist Laurie Lipton's best known drawings, a woman with a ferocious look in her eyes bites down on what one assumes, initially, to be a piece of fruit. Except it's not a piece of fruit. It's a baby's head, grasped in the woman's fingers like an apple.

The work is called "Love Bite," a sardonic title that hints at Lipton's almost gleeful encounter with the perverse and taboo. Women in our society are supposed to express maternal elation with infants, right, not snack on them.

The name of the drawing serves as the title for James Scott's short documentary on the artist, Love Bite: Laurie Lipton and Her Disturbing Black & White Drawings. The 34-minute film, named a Vimeo Staff Pick, is free of charge on the platform [click this link]. It's also embedded here:

Love Bite: Laurie Lipton and Her Disturbing Black & White Drawings from James Scott on Vimeo.

The film, which first caught my eye at the SXSW Film Festival in 2016, is one of my favorite short documentaries of recent years - which says something about my own taste in art, but also the skill of the filmmaker.

Love Bite shows the artist drafting multiple pieces on paper, works that look somewhat like M.C. Escher by way of Hieronymus Bosch - without Bosch's moralism. Her art is remarkably detailed and hyper-real, with the intensity of a nightmare. But also funny, at least to me.

"When traveling around Europe as a student, she began developing her very own peculiar drawing technique," Lipton's official website observes, "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.'"

Black and white is the color of ghosts... It's the color of past and longing.

--Artist Laurie Lipton in Love Bite, on why she draws in black and white

"I've been drawing now for over 50 years," Lipton notes in the documentary. "I'm isolated, I'm in my head, I'm in this piece of paper." 

That statement may sound despairing (on paper), but it's said with a mirthful glint in her eye. Lipton speaks of being compelled to draw, of feeling like it's what she was put on the Earth to do, and essentially has no control over the destiny dictated to her.

"All I can do is draw," she says with amusement. "It's all I'm good for." 

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The director comments, "I came across Laurie Lipton’s work completely by accident in a Winnipeg bong shop cum bookstore in 2011. Her drawing Señorita Muerte was on the cover of a book of her drawings, it locked eyes with me from across the room and drew me towards it. Little knowing that when I opened it I would discover a body of work that totally mesmerised me. Never had I seen images that affected me in such a way. It was a 'religious' experience seeing them for the first time, especially one particular piece called Love Bite."

Scott adds in his director's statement, "With the prolific work ethic of a 16th century monk making illuminated manuscripts, she is completely dedicated to her obsessive craft, a dedication rarely seen in the modern day."

You cannot unsee a Laurie Lipton drawing.

--Love Bite director James Scott

I met Lipton at a party in Los Angeles last year thrown by the writer, poet, critic and musician Victoria Looseleaf. At first I didn't realize Lipton was the woman whose astounding drawings I had first seen a couple of years previously. Eventually, we somehow traced the connection back to the post card of Love Bite I had seen at SXSW. There is something delightfully devious about her both in the film and in person - an ostensibly conventional looking woman who spends her days meticulously shattering conventions.

"You want weird? I'll give you weird," she mutters at one point in Love Bite.

In the documentary she talks about developing an interest in drawing from a very young age. From early on her sketches leapt from the page with disturbing psychological thrust, but she recalls her parents as being quite supportive.

"Instead of having me sectioned," Lipton says, "or put on medicine, they praised me."

Laurie Lipton with two of her pieces. Photo by Eric Minh Swenson/from www.laurielipton.com

Scott superbly weaves black and white archival video through his film, mostly from the 1950s, to suggest the milieu from which Lipton sprang, including homemakers in their kitchens brimming with forced enthusiasm, and a nuclear disaster drill in which schoolchildren are warned what to do in the event of a Soviet attack (apparently all it took to protect oneself from radioactive fallout was to duck under a desk).

From those scary times sprang a dark imagination. In Love Bite Lipton also recalls a deeply disturbing incident from her childhood that was to color her whole life -- or perhaps one should say it was to remove the color from her whole life.

"Black and white is the color of ghosts," she observes in Love Bite. "It's the color of past and longing. It's almost the color of thought."

"I'm Fine, Thanks" (2018). ©Laurie Lipton