Essays & Reviews

This is an interview done by art critic and broadcaster Luke Clancy for the CAP Foundation’s studio’s catalogue 2007.

It documents the spirit of the time and it gives some idea about my attitude to my work.  Luke’s speech is in bold print and mine in ordinary print.

Daniel Lipstein is an artist out of time, one so involved with values that will not make it into the art magazines as to seem like a figure arrived intact from another age. His is, above all, an art that creates its own environment, its own justifications, almost oblivious to the agendas around it.
Like very few of his contemporaries, Lipstein is prepared to use the word ‘spiritual’ in the context of the concerns of his art, to discuss the power of symbolic figures that appear by chance in his paintings and to detect chi in his images, indeed consciously to imbue his paintings with this mysterious force.
What is most remarkable, however, is that this seems as good an explanation as any when faced with the artist’s enormous canvases, with their dense over-painting of writhing, ecstatic pigment highlighted throughout with semi-legible incantations, written in an endless luminous stream into the wet paint with a steel nib. ?

Both of you have worked in very large scale here, really making use of the space in the Studio.
Large scale is very good for me. With a large scale you can work very emotionally. It takes the best part of a month to make a picture this size…I used to express myself a lot in writing. I wrote volumes and volumes. So writing is something that comes quite easily to me, expressing myself in writing. So I tried to bring that into the paintings too, the insertion of writing in paintings.

What are you writing about?
It is a diary of dreams, I started writing it in 1979, recording my dreams and I just kept going and it turned into writing. I think that my writing is probably more developed than my painting. I am looking for something; I’m searching all the time. I am always looking for a medium that will express the truth of what I feel. So, I got skilled as a print maker and at that time I used to do paintings but they were preparatory work for prints: the final product was always supposed to be a print. This year I am doing paintings and they are the final product themselves….Printing was really the continuation of sketch books. I loved sketchbooks, the ease of working that way. All you need is a pen and some paper and you can just go on and on. You see I’m a complete graphomaniac, someone who is totally addicted to ink. I lived with a pen in my hand, without that there was no reality.

And when you look at the paintings close up, you can see that you have been writing on them too. What are you trying to achieve through those graphic marks?
I stand there and write and write into the paint. I use the same tool that I use for making a plate. And I stay there writing for hours and hours. You see that mountain there? That mountain all by itself took fifteen hours…the process is that when I do the under-painting I just lash into it. I can go at it for hours and hours and just go mad. Sometimes I scream my head off and just get the canvas covered, because it doesn’t matter: it will all be painted over again later. But the effects that you create that way are just very interesting. After I have done that under-painting I can identify elements that are interesting in it — like this image of a fish that I have used before and it turns up in the under-painting, so I start to work with that. And these images that sometime show up, the subliminal elements — like this prehistoric fish — they are the truth of the painting. In the picture there are a lot of symbols which are personal to me, but somehow they often also connect with other people too. So for me the act of doing art, of painting, is a kind of intensified dream work. Except you are awake — or you think you are awake — but anything can happen. It’s an absolutely magical way of life.
I used to do natural medicine for years. I used to do healing. In natural medicine there is a term chi, which is a kind of energy. Now, people who work with antiques they can use this chi to authenticate an antique, to see if it is a real one. And for me a painting is also a chi carrier, an intense chi carrier. Paint itself is just goo, just matter. But there is the mind that arranges the matter and enters the painting via that and this is the chi…The writing is also a kind of structure, a kind of information about the principles. Because what you see is just what appears, but it has been created out of principles. What you see then is just a metaphor for the principles that underlie everything…

What is the origin of this series of pictures you are showing?
I only realised half way through the exhibition what I was doing with these pictures.  Some of the pictures originate in a trip I made to Norway about twenty years ago. The picture of the lake, for example, that is a lake I saw with my own eyes and I can still remember the dream I dreamed at dawn before seeing the lake…but a lot of the truth of the picture is what is happening outside the frame. The picture points out and relates also to what takes place outside of it.
I like the idea of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The Dionysian is the explosive one, the person who does things, who creates things, who is in the moment. And he doesn’t examine things. And the Apollonian is the visual one, the aesthetic one. The one who comes after and examines and enjoys things aesthetically. So, when I do the pictures I am the Dionysian, so to speak. And afterwards I take a step back. Go and walk around the block, and when I come back I am the Apollonian. And then I look at the picture from outside. But, of course, it is a battle between the two, because after looking at a picture for a while I’m wondering am I too far outside the picture now? You have to really live with the picture, inside the picture. I put everything I can into it. To do a picture, you have to live inside the picture. Nowhere else.

David was talking about a certain paranoia being part of painting. Does that hold true for you too then?
Well, if I don’t feel sure, then I don’t do anything. Because if you add the wrong mark you have lost it completely. You shouldn’t have done that at all. So I make sure it doesn’t happen. I get myself into the right state of mind to paint before I do it. I write and I think about what I’m going to do. I ask myself a lot of questions. Like this picture for example that I couldn’t start for days. I have to ask myself: ‘Why are you doing this picture? What is the emotional reason and driving force that brings you to do this picture?’

The dream imagery that turns up in your pictures is often combined with images from photographs that you have taken. What is your interest in using photographs, or photography?
One of my great heroes is the French photographer,Henri Cartier-Bresson. He was a photographer who was a painter. But the thing about photography is that once you press the button there is no way back. You’re finished. It’s eternity. So when I make a painting from a picture that I had taken as a photograph I am investigating ‘who was the person who took that picture?’ ‘Who was that person that saw that scene in that way?’
The thing is if you want to paint, you really have to look outside painting, to look at everything…I am very interested in music and that gets reflected in my paintings too. Right now, I think my painting is a bit melodious. But I want to develop it to be more like modern classical music or jazz.  But this is where I have to go from, because that is where I am now. I’m interested in Bob Dylan’s idea of the riff, the first riff that is in fact the most brilliant, but then the orchestral arrangement can actually just kill it. It can blur it so that you can’t hear the inspiration of the brilliance of the moment. You have to guard the things that are providential.

But who organises providence?
Well, the Lord God I am sure…I believe in the Lord God. The reason I believe in God is because if you only study nature, it is quite a limited study. But if you study the things of revelation — and I am not only talking about the Judeo-Christian tradition, I’m talking about the Eastern traditions too — the things that are not seen. I mean how can you study the things that are not seen? Yet, people get to firm conclusions about it. It’s called faith. Faith is a way of knowing something. And that is good. It feels good.

Reviews:

Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, 14th, April, 2015

Daniel Lipstein’s etchings and aquatints have a dreamy, meditative quality not a million miles removed in feeling from the paintings of Marc Chagall. Lipstein’s work is informed by meditation, and he has written about keeping a dream journal.

He was born in Tel Aviv, and he sees the Mediterranean as an archetypal source and symbol, and it is the sea that features in his landscapes, along with his more immediate inland surroundings of the last 30 years or so, close to the Curragh of Kildare.

He also has a background in natural medicine, and his images are imbued with compassion. They explore human experience, from childhood to adulthood, in a gentle, allegorical vein.

Everything has a metaphysical weight and significance. The tree, for example, that recurs from image to image, could well be the tree of knowledge given its glowing, enhanced presence. This might sound forced or contrived, but it’s not. The aquatints are built up from several densely textured, coloured plates – plus copper dust judiciously applied – and the end results have an exceptionally rich consistency and surface.

(all rights reserved to The Irish Times)

Niall MacMonagle, What Lies Beneath, Sunday Independent, 19th, April, 2015

Homeward by Daniel Lipstein, etching and aquatint, courtesy of the artist and the Graphic Studio Gallery

When Daniel Lipstein, born Tel Aviv, first arrived in Ireland he lived on Dublin’s Clanbrasill Street, and later in a one room set up in Phibsboro. “There was nothing there” says Lipstein.  But his creative energies allowed him to distance himself from his ordinary, uninspiring surroundings. He adopted persona, called him Jonathan, a Jonathan who lived in West Cork.  This new self knew “the moods and the life of the ocean” and Daniel lived inside his dreaming mind.

For Lipstein his artwork is “a wakeful continuation of this dream life”.

He read all of Freud in his twenties, was especially impressed by The Interpretation of Dreams, and in his own dream world he sees trees full of fish, full of mushroom, levitating lovers.  In a work entitled Self Portrait with a Tree and a Buthtub, he appears as a sheep.

When he speaks about his work his tone is life-filled and he has never lost that sense of wonder which sustained him as a twenty four year old in Dublin city.  Now at fifty six, and living in rural Kildare, he dreams while fully awake.  His back garden is far from the sea but when he paints that garden the ocean is there.

“What didn’t exist before, that is the beginning of art” and the ocean “can be sensed from the sky. You don’t hear symphonies in nature” adds Lipstein.  “Visual art is not always copied from reality” but it “must be essential, truthful”.

Lipstein, an animist, sees a soul presence in everything.  In this image, Homeward, there is a wonderful sense of a super natural power in everything.  The four-plate etching, a labor-intensive process, surges with life and movement.

On the left; to the right, fish are heading over land towards a bathtub or ocean.  “If you are feeling small – it’s the bathtub; on a confident day you head towards the ocean”.  Straddling the diptych, a flock of birds in flight.  Land, sea and sky.

“The ocean is where evolution started”.  Is that Daniel Lipstein’s idea of God, of home? “I don’t know what is God. My God is much bigger than the ocean.”  But everywhere he looks, he sees the sea.  He can dream, can’t he?

(all rights reserved to Sunday Independent)

Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, June 07
There is consciously allegorical quality to Lipstein’s paintings.  They are densely worked landscapes with an odd luminosity – that is to say,  a kind of inner radiance rather than a naturalistic light.  Part of their dense surface textures turns out to consist of handwritten text, adding to their revelatory, visionary air.
In fact, Lipstein notes that many of them were inspired by time spent in Norway many years ago, one of those periods in life that have a particular magical impact.  That sense of wonder is what he goes for, and he does manage to convey a dreamlike intensity…..

(all rights reserved to The Irish Times)

Katie Gilroy, Totally Dublin, December 08
……  Daniel Lipstein’s ‘Train Robbery’ evokes a sense of fervency and excitement; the murmur of the passing carriage is almost audible in the textured scribbles and zealous tones of the etching that was inspired by Macdara Woods ‘Seconds Out’.

(all rights reserved to Totally Dublin)

Mary Kavanagh, Leinser Express, September 2012

Portarlington Library is currently hosting an exhibition of work called ‘Dreamcompositions’ by artist Daniel Lipstein.  Daniel is a painter and a printmaker who is based in county Kildare, and who is a member of the Graphic Studio Dublin.  He holds a Masters Degree in Fine Art from the National College of Art and Design.  Daniel is a winner of several awards such as the CAP Foundation in 2006 and the first prize award at the Biennial Print-making Exhibition at Galway Arts Center in 2010.  The work currently being exhibited in Portarlington library was made during the last ten years.  These are etchings in hard and soft grounds, triple and double plate etchings and aquatint, dry point, carborandum and lithographs.  These are compositions based on landscapes and dreams, or dreamscapes, and are called ‘Dreamcompositions’. For example, one of the small etching called ‘Watercourse’ was done in 2002 and it is a meditation about the hereafter inspired by Flann O’Brien’s book ‘The Third Policeman’.  Daniel’s work is partly based on the power and flow of writing.  In traditional printmaking plates are registered behind other plates in order to create additional marks and colour support for key plates when a full bodied colourful etching is done.  In this exhibition there are two works where the artist has decided to show the supporting colour plate beside the key plate instead of registering it behind the key plate.  This was done in order to highlight the beauty and the subtleties of the aquatint colour plate of ‘Facing the Spirit of the Ocean’, and the colour carborandum plate of ‘Dreamcomposition 2’.

(all rights reserved to Leinster Express)

An essay by Dr. Yael Weiler Israel.  (Hebrew)