Show Preview | Jeremy Lipking – 30 Years a Painter

Over the past 30 years, Jeremy Lipking has been one of the notable artists at the forefront of reviving realism in American painting. Mounted by the Booth Western Art Museum, Jeremy Lipking – 30 Years a Painter (1996-2026), presents this formidable painter in a mid-career retrospective featuring more than 30 celebrated works. The exhibition opens on April 11 with an exclusive member opening from 4 to 7 p.m. with a lecture by the artist at 6 p.m. The next day, Sunday, April 12, Lipking will be on hand for a program for members of the National Portrait Society and the public.

Lipking was born into an artistic family; his home was a gathering place for “artists and musicians.” His father, Ronald, an advertising designer, children’s book illustrator and landscape painter, was Jeremy’s first instructor. In 1997, Lipking began his studies at the California Art Institute. He remained there as student and teacher for six years, finding sources of inspiration in John Singer Sargent, Joaquín Sorolla and Anders Zorn as well as fellow California artists Edgar Payne and William Wendt. What unites those artists is their ability to paint figures in a landscape and it is this art, in particular, that characterizes Lipking’s work. For Lipking, figure and landscape must correlate in color, form and, perhaps most of all, in mystery.

SILENCE & SAGEBRUSH, a 2014 oil, for example, finds a young woman wrapped in a blanket, looking out over a field of sage at what is, presumably, dawn. Lipking layers textures—blanket over sage over the relative smoothness of the lavender ridge and the unclouded lemon yellow sky. But, as if to exemplify Lipking’s search for and insistence on correlation, the curve of the ridge matches the curve of the blanket over the young woman’s back. It might not be something we notice, but it is something we feel, this congruence of forms, this correlation of figure and landscape.

Painted four years later, TWILIGHT TRAIL is more complex composition, with a woman walking alongside a cabin and a child who appears to be a version of Red Riding Hood. Lipking compels our eyes to take in the woman and the side of the cabin—they are dark and large—as well as the footprint at the bottom edge of the canvas, before we move to the girl and the evergreen at left and then, at last, look up and out at the mirrored water and the rolling hills on the other side. Subtle but deliberate asymmetries counterbalanced by the lines and curves imprinted in the snow keep our eyes moving.

In SPRING WATERFALL, a pure landscape, Lipking alternates forms depicting rushing water and solid rock. The fall spills from a shallow chord of tangled brush at center top and opens out between, over and around the rocks before coming to fitful rest in the beginning of a pool that spans the bottom of the picture. An ode to sound and silence, movement and stillness, flow and mass, the painting epitomizes the mystery Lipking seeks in all his work, the mystery that will be on display at the Booth. —James D. Balestrieri

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This story appeared in the April/May 2026 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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