Modern Magazine: Through the Looking Glass
Through the Looking Glass
By FRANCES BRENT | October 1, 2015
HOW DO YOU GET INSIDE A PICTURE and what can you do there? These are questions a child asks and an adult struggles to answer. A picture, of course, is an illusion. You get inside through imagination. Once there, you might assume it’s full of words since objects tell stories.
Beth Lipman is an artist who became interested in the world of pictures, particularly by those Italian and Dutch painters whose still lifes depict a compendium of natural and inanimate objects at rest. Her medium is glass. As she has explained, “I use blowing, solid sculpting, kiln-forming, lampworking. I paint on the glass with craft paint, I glue it together with silicone, I do whatever it takes to create the object.” Inspired by the narratives of the early masters, she began making goblets, jars, cups, bottles, and bowls—traditional vessels that glassmakers have been crafting since ancient times—as well as virtuosic life-sized sculptured glass fruit and flowers, fish and fowl, which she arranges and affixes on wooden table tops. The result: giant, three-dimensional still lifes, transparent renderings of material once stuck inside a picture plane. By translating the flat painted objects and coaxing them into architectural space, the artist facilitates conversations about consumption and identity, beauty and perishability, perfection and imperfection, abundance and excess, patience and cruelty.