“I believe in art, in making art.
That, along with being a mother,
has been the focus of my life.”
Pat Lipsky
When asked “What got you
interested in art?” the American abstract painter Pat Lipsky replied “I was good at it.”
As she elaborated to The Art Students League of New York’s
Executive Director, Ira Goldberg, ”My
mother, you could say, was very ambitious. I had dance classes. I played the
piano— total disaster. My father was interested in poetry. My parents had met
at a poetry class. So it was a very arty background. I was interested in many
things. I seemed to be pretty good at painting.”
Her ability was confirmed when at 16 her self portrait won
first prize in the New York City Scholastic Art
Award. Her work was shown at the New York Coliseum and acquired
by Hallmark Cards. Lipsky was also offered a four-year scholarship at
Miami University. An offer she rejected, Lipsky elected to attend Cornell
University instead. As she said “I wanted to study art, but also be in a
college that was demanding.”
This was followed by four
years at New York’s Hunter College towards the end of which Lipsky considered
herself a painter. “I had gone to the studios at Hunter almost every
day, as a painter would, and produced a body of work. I had my first solo show
two years after graduating,” She has said.
A dedicated abstractionist Lipsky’s major concern is with color
and the relationships between them, as she has explained, “It’s about the painting being a metaphor for truth. It’s
about truth. It’s about honesty. I use color as the way to show that because I
have a deep inherent feeling for color.”
Even her 2001 to 2003 figurative
body of work is primarily about color. As she told the Lalitamba Journal
“My series, Les Vitraux, “stained glass windows” in French, has to do with
color. I was strongly influenced by the 12th and 13th century windows in French
cathedrals like Chartres, Bourges, Le Man, Troyes and others that I visited
between 2000 and 2004. I was impressed by the fauve colors that these
glassmakers invented. I thought that they were the true Fauve. I decided to do
a series entirely different from my other work, based on these charming
medieval images that were clearly inspired by religion.”
With a career spanning over five decades Lipsky still
considers herself a painter, for as she has said “I don’t like the word artist.
It sounds pretentious to me. Matisse considered himself a painter, and Picasso
thought of himself as an artist. I prefer Matisse.”
Her latest exhibition of paintings Pat Lipsky: Twenty Years is
currently on show at Boston’s Acme Fine Art until the 25th of April.
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