{"id":60200,"date":"2025-10-08T02:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T02:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/60200\/"},"modified":"2025-10-08T02:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T02:31:09","slug":"at-84-painter-pat-lipsky-is-returning-to-her-color-soaked-origins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/60200\/","title":{"rendered":"At 84, Painter Pat Lipsky Is Returning to Her Color-Soaked Origins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Portrait of Pat Lipsky. Photo by Thomas Victor. Image via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p>\n

When she was in the second grade, artist Pat Lipsky<\/a> took a watercolor class at school. The teacher walked down the aisle, checking the class\u2019s progress, until she stopped at Lipsky\u2019s desk. Holding it up for the class, the teacher announced, \u201cLook at Pat\u2019s beautiful colors!\u201d Lipsky recalled. \u201cRuined my life!\u201d she joked, more than 70 years later, when I visited her in her 10th-floor New York studio. <\/p>\n

The 84-year-old painter has been grappling with color ever since that moment. Her abstract color-field<\/a> canvases are built on contrasts, where hues collide and find precarious balance. It\u2019s a matter of instinct, she said\u2014a magical moment when the materials suddenly come alive. Lipsky has been showing in galleries since 1968, but her paintings are seeing a new surge of attention. On October 9th, James Fuentes<\/a> will open her solo show of new and old works, \u201cColor Next to Color<\/a>,\u201d in Tribeca, timed with the release of her memoir Brightening Glance: Recollections of a New York Painter (2025). Together, the exhibition and book spotlight her career-long pursuit of color\u2019s expressive force. Many of her new works use similar techniques to one of her favorite works: Chrysanthemum (1971), a large stain painting shown at Frieze Los Angeles 2025<\/a> and acquired by the de Young Museum<\/a>. \u201cI would give my right arm if I could do that again,\u201d she said\u2014and with the new canvases, it looks as if she\u2019s getting close.<\/p>\n

Early life<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Portrait of Pat Lipsky in her studio. Courtesy of James Fuentes Gallery.<\/p>\n

The wall above Lipsky\u2019s desk is covered with images tracing her entire life. After attending Cornell University, Lipsky enrolled in a master\u2019s program at Hunter College, where legendary sculptor Tony Smith<\/a> became her mentor. Lipsky recalled, \u201cAs a teacher, he was just incredibly engaging. He would sit down right next to you, no matter what you were working on\u2014even if it was the dumbest picture you ever saw\u2014and he would just talk to you. That was so touching to me.\u201d Enrolled in what was technically a one-year program, she stayed for four years, simply to keep working with Smith.<\/p>\n

In the late 1960s, Lipsky briefly turned to mathematics as inspiration. Influenced by Frank Stella<\/a>\u2019s geometric rigor and Smith\u2019s fascination with geodesic domes, she began sketching curves on graph paper. The results were three large canvases she came to call her \u201cTuring\u201d paintings, named after the famed mathematician Alan Turing. The paintings translate the mathematics of natural patterns\u2014like ripples in water\u2014into painted curves plotted across a gridded field. Suddenly, she didn\u2019t need to plot these color-fields. Instead, her work transformed into the gestural, sometimes explosive color-field and color-stain paintings she\u2019s known for. The \u201cTuring\u201d works have never been shown publicly until now; two of the three will be included in the James Fuentes exhibition.<\/p>\n

\"Pat<\/p>\n

Shortly after graduating in 1968, Lipsky set her sights on finding a gallery. She took a small box of Kodachrome slides to the gallery of Andr\u00e9 Emmerich, then one of the most influential dealers in New York. \u201cI went over and said to the secretary, \u2018I\u2019d like to show these to Mr. Emmerich,\u2019 and she said, \u2018Oh, of course he\u2019s not seeing anything.\u2019 And he was standing about 50 feet away. This was one of the great moments in my life\u2014I just walked right past her and showed him.\u201d Within two years, Lipsky was represented by Emmerich, alongside color-field painters like Morris Louis<\/a> and Helen Frankenthaler<\/a>. In her first year, she sold 70 paintings.<\/p>\n

Color-stain technique<\/p>\n

\"Pat<\/p>\n

Lipsky\u2019s early canvases drew energy from the color-stain innovations of Louis and Frankenthaler, and the full-on force of Jackson Pollock<\/a>. \u201cPollock was really the main influence,\u201d she said. \u201cI was riveted by the intensity of the colors [Louis] was getting\u2014there was something very charismatic about the work.\u201d Though Lipsky was inspired by Frankenthaler, she proved to be a more complicated presence. \u201cI hated her and she hated me\u2014she was a horrible person,\u201d Lipsky said, laughing.<\/p>\n

In the late 1960s and early \u201970s, she harnessed her natural sense of color. Winter (1971), on view in the James Fuentes show, features a dark gradient that bleeds from midnight blue to a luxurious purple, one of her stain paintings, which she mostly worked on between 1968 and 1975. Other works, like the polychromatic Springs Fireplace (1969) or new quad-color abstraction Emamate (2025), show Lipsky\u2019s interest in contrast that has endured over the years. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Pat Lipsky, installation view of \u201cColor Next to Color\u201d at James Fuentes Gallery in New York. Photo by New Document. Courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, New York and Los Angeles. <\/p>\n

Lipsky explained that her practice is purely instinctual. \u201cI have no interest or belief in color theory,\u201d she clarified.\u201cI approached painting in a Freudian way.\u2026I just free associate,\u201d said Lipsky. \u201cYou don\u2019t tell the painting what to do. You\u2019re with the painting, and painting is, in some sense, guiding you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Current work: a return to acrylic<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Pat Lipsky, installation view of Winter (1971) in \u201cColor Next to Color\u201d at James Fuentes Gallery in New York. Photo by New Document. Courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, New York and Los Angeles. <\/p>\n

While Lipsky began her career working in acrylic, she then pivoted to using oil paint for several decades, creating \u201cheavy\u201d and \u201caustere\u201d works, as she called them. \u201cI was going crazy with oil paint syndrome,\u201d she said. However, more recently, she has returned to the acrylic style that she made her name with after uncovering some unstretched canvases from the 1970s. Her new works tap into her older technique, where the color-fields appear iridescent.<\/p>\n

At this moment in her career, she\u2019s comparing herself to French novelist Gustave Flaubert. Though best known for Madame Bovary, it took him years to return to the narrative techniques that made him famous, in the short story A Simple Heart. \u201cIt\u2019s exactly the style of Madame Bovary,\u201d Lipsky explained. \u201cHe went back to the style, and I deliberately went back.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Pat<\/p>\n

Lipsky called acrylic a \u201cNew York paint,\u201d because it dries quickly, and \u201cNew York is fast.\u201d Some of her new works feature giant blocks of color, like the red color-field in Lost Painting (2023). At James Fuentes, the selection of new paintings draws a throughline across her career. Dream<\/a> (2024), featuring horizontal bands of turquoise, purple, midnight blue, and red, delivers the same immediacy and urgency of her younger years. Meanwhile, the new quad-color abstraction Emamate (2025) features pastel bands which appear to float gently across raw canvas, soft yet insistent, much like her earliest works, where rivulets of color bled outward onto the canvas. This show underlines how her language of color\u2014whether explosive or restrained\u2014has remained central.<\/p>\n

Reminiscing on her early works, she recalled how \u201cit was tremendously exciting to do.\u201d \u201cI was flying,\u201d she said. Today, she\u2019s tapping back into that sensation with unmistakable glee.<\/p>\n

MR<\/p>\n

\"MR\"<\/p>\n

Maxwell Rabb<\/p>\n

Maxwell Rabb (Max) is a writer. Before joining Artsy in October 2023, he obtained an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from the University of Georgia. Outside of Artsy, his bylines include the Washington Post, i-D, and the Chicago Reader. He lives in New York City, by way of Atlanta, New Orleans, and Chicago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Portrait of Pat Lipsky. Photo by Thomas Victor. Image via Wikimedia Commons. When she was in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60201,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[19359,437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46,44574,22410,44573],"class_list":{"0":"post-60200","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-artist-profiles","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-artsdesign","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-il","16":"tag-israel","17":"tag-james-fuentes","18":"tag-maxwell-rabb","19":"tag-pat-lipsky"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}