Reflections

“The end result is what I aim for -- not the perfection of ‘Wow, what an amazing technical feat!’” Beth Lipman declares. Nevertheless, the young sculptor, who has work in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Corning Museum of Glass, consistently wows viewers with the glittering virtuosity of her three-dimensional recreations of 17th- and 18th-century still life paintings, each incorporating 50 to 100 pieces of skillfully wrought glass.

Much of Lipman's work deals with abundance and excess and, especially, food, which she likes to point out is a universally recognized, valued thing. In her solo show at Mangel Gallery, Lipman, currently a resident of New Hampshire, is showing seven pieces from her extended series "The Still Life Revisited."

Whenever possible -- usually only in a museum -- she prefers to show her sculpture with the original painting. Failing that rare opportunity, Lipman generally attaches a small reproduction of the American, Italian or Dutch still life which inspired each work to the back of the pedestal or table displaying the full-size reconstruction, rich with meaning and sensuous surfaces. The mystery of representation -- Is it true or intrinsically false? -- is underscored by the fact that one cannot directly compare the sculpture from the point of view of the painting with the copy of the painting.

On one level, still life painting traditionally pays homage to the bounty of nature, God's gift to humanity. More superficially but inescapably, these paintings record the affluent circumstances of the artist or the patron who commissioned them: fine linens, crystal and fresh, abundant food, the stuff of life. Countering this show of vanity, many historic still lifes were vanitas paintings, deliberate reminders of the brevity of life. They pointed to fleeting material pleasures as a hollow contrast to infinite, ineffable spiritual joy -- or, at least, to infinite death.

Representations of decadence, decay and waste are emblematic of mortality. They include tipped-over wine glasses, insects and the damage caused by them, as well as broken stems and bruises. Dead game, such as birds in two of Lipman's pieces at Mangel, suggest conquest -- the successful hunter -- and death. Split melons in John F. Francis' Still Life with Fruit, one of the works Lipman made during a recent fellowship at the Creative Glass Center of America (CGCA), in Millville, N.J., seem almost eviscerated, while cascading grapes hang like bloody gobbets of flesh. Just as the bloom on a peach fades, so does youth and life. Yet, paradoxically, although the subjects of the paintings, their owners and authors are dust today, the represented scenes remain sparkling and fresh for our contemplation.

At a third remove from the original living fruit, Lipman's glass versions are ambiguous. Glass is solid and almost imperishable, though fragile by definition. Moreover, representing painted objects in clear glass, as she does in her reconstruction of the Francis painting, perversely dissolves solidity in an optically challenging maze of reflections and transparencies. "It's about the essence of the lusciousness of what's going on," Lipman says. That luscious ambiguity is driven home by Lipman's depiction of shadows in the original Francis painting as gold embedded in glass -- more reflection than shade.

She made the Francis piece especially for her upcoming show here because John Francis (1808-1886), the most famous American still-life painter of his day, lived and worked in Philadelphia. For this show, she also based a work on Strawberries and Three Cherries by Philadelphian Margaretta Peale, a granddaughter of Charles Willson Peale, founder of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. This smaller work on a gray platform inside a Plexiglas box is entirely black with the exception of the flesh of the cherries, which is executed in clear glass with black pits visible inside.

During her CGCA residency, Lipman visited the Museum of American Glass where she was drawn to the "coralene" technique of coating glass surfaces with tiny glass beads. "It was popular in the 1870s and '80s," she says. "The pieces at the museum are very frilly but the surface feels kind of moldy or decaying to me." She used coralene beading to emphasize both the strawberry texture and the putrefaction suggested by the transformation of bright fruits into funereal black.

Still life as a subject attracted Lipman in part because it has always been considered a secondary or lower form of painting -- not as elite, challenging or content-driven as portraiture or "history painting," for example. Glass and fiber (Lipman's other primary medium) are often considered second-class materials for fine arts, so she sees them as akin to still life.

Furthermore, Lipman explains, "I'm a woman working in a material [glass] that 30 years ago a woman wasn't allowed to touch." Her observation reminds us that for centuries aspiring women painters were not allowed to work from the nude (supposedly to protect their "modesty"), but still life was considered a suitably ladylike subject and one which was not overly challenging.

In commenting on the strictures of the past, Lipman has chosen a path which is very challenging and labor intensive. Transcending the pejorative "crafts" label, she presents her work as a consummate complete sculpture. In the fierce searing atmosphere of the hot shop (glass studio), Lipman works almost expressionistically, knifing a glowing gather of soft solid glass on the end of a metal rod into rugged facets to suggest rather than represent individual, life-size grapes and turning out dozens of peaches in short order. "I'm striving for drawing in glass, not an academic rendition but a translation of objects in my voice and my material," she explains.

An admirer of outsider art, Lipman describes herself as a "craft child," who frequently assisted her mother with tole painting and other similar projects. At one time, she disdained the decorative "country" craft aesthetic, but now she respects "the humility of making utilitarian decorative objects" and freely borrows useful techniques. For example, she painted crosshatch tole stokes in fire-on enamels to give a basket in the Francis work a sense of texture.

She is not bound to functional perfection when making props like baskets, spoons and sugar bowls. Lids lack flanges, baskets lack symmetry and slumped spoons are a little flat. In the finished work, they will not be handled. The carefully calculated arrangements of glass objects are permanently mounted and sometimes protected inside Plexiglas boxes. The largest work in the Mangel show, Cupboard Picture with Flowers, Fruit, and Goblets (after Flegel) (Georg Flegel, c. 1610), is a sumptuous mourning vignette executed in black glass, and placed against a black ground inside a white framed wooden cupboard. "In the painting there are clear goblets and the perishables are vivid colors," Lipman says, "but I turned all the perishables into dusty, decaying things by dusting them with copper that looks just like ash."

Lipman's sculpture is sumptuous, seductive and more. The frozen, ghostly array of glittering overabundance elicits the frisson of Miss Haversham's unconsumed and unconsummated wedding feast in order to remind us that we have always lived in a world in which food and consumption have the ultimate political and social implications.

Beth Lipman, April 12- May 2, Reception, Fri., April 12, 5-7 p.m., Mangel Gallery, 1714 Rittenhouse Sq., 215-545-4343.

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