Jeremy Lipking enjoys the process of wandering. As he journeys through life and explores different paths, his watchful eye continually searches for the subject of his next painting. Sometimes he’s captivated by a sight he’s never seen before. Other times, he paints an object from his everyday life, fascinated by how the light touches it at that very moment. By striving to capture the “here and now” in his paintings, Lipking injects into his classic and romantic images an ethereal, almost mysterious quality – something that many other artists have attempted to copy, but have not been able to replicated.
Born in Santa Monica , California in 1975, Lipking is a fourth-generation California artist and the son of Ronald Lipking, an advertising designer, children’s book illustrator and landscape painter. His early exposure to art – the constant presence of paints and brushes in his childhood home and frequent trips to local museums and galleries with his father – provided the younger Lipking with a strong foundation of the basics of design and drawing.
But it was the years he spent from 1996 to 1999 at the California Art Institute, which enabled him to make a tremendous leap as an artist. His instructors taught him to look at the world differently – to not, for example, look at the eyes and nose as distinct elements of the face, but to detect the shapes created by lights and darks and the subtleties of color. Following his studies at the institute, he embarked on an intensive self-directed effort to improve his paintings, closely examining the works of artists he most admired: John Singer Sargent, Spanish plein-air painter Joaquin Sorolla, and Swedish artist Anders Zorn, among others.
In 2001, at the age of 25, Lipking began attracting attention of the international art community. He received both the Gold Medal and the Museum Director’s Award at the California Art Club’s 91st Annual Gold Medal Juried Exhibition, one of the country’s most prestigious exhibitions of contemporary-traditional fine art. A year later, at the 92nd Annual Gold Medal Exhibition, he received the Museum Purchase Award. Lipking has had four solo exhibitions and has participated in many gallery and museum exhibitions. In 2003 he was asked to participate in the Arnot Museum ’s exhibition Re-presenting Representation, in New York . Magazines ranging from Art and Antiques and Art News to Art-Talk and Southwest Art began reporting on his meteoric career and the enigmatic quality of his work that appeals to a growing list of collectors.
Today, while Lipking feels especially compelled to paint the most classical of artistic subjects, the human figure, his body of work also includes landscapes and still lifes – whatever subjects manage to capture his interest as he continually searches the world around him for reasons to put his brush to canvas.
