Jeremy Lipking’s Realist Paintings of Figures and Landscapes

Realism is more than a painting technique for some. When we look at Jeremy Lipking‘s realist oil paintings, we are looking at a faithful representation of life that has earned him comparisons to his art heroes like John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn, but we are also looking at the artist himself: “I feel like throughout the duration of a painting, I can go through all the human emotions from start to finish,” he says.

Producing work mainly in oils, his canvases consist of realistic indoor and outdoor settings. Lipking’s fascination with beautiful figures is unquestionable as he portrays theme using nuanced color schemes and natural lighting. Figures are portrayed in repose, bathing or wading through shallow pools, while other paintings are a careful light study of night fall or the touches of a sunset on the desert mesa. Although his work is far from idealistic, there is a certain romance about the way he captures their essence. In other words, his paintings are more than just a copy of what lay in front of him, but allow the viewer to wander around and inside of the picture.

Lipking describes his way of working as less conventional, working from details like the details in a fabric or movements in a landscape, and composing the painting around that. This allows for a more spontaneous approach, which owes to the effect of capturing the subject in a candid moment. “It can be about that one thing that you notice first, whether it’s the color harmony, a nice design, or even just the lighting. It’s different for every painting. But being able to capture that theme is what really can make it special.”