Art of Gabriel

Friday Art Class

editor — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 06:03:01 +0000

Gabriel’s next session to start on Friday, July 9th.
The ability to capture the personality or mood of a model in a painting takes expert precision, a mastery of painting techniques, and the ability to look beyond color and form to bring out a masterpiece. Gabriel will be teaching students to see as well as paint over an 8-week course this summer. Gabriel has been teaching oil painting for over 10 years and is now accepting new students for his July 9^th – Aug. 27^th session.

This session we will focus on painting from life. We will be painting from models for the entire 8-weeks. We will have two 4-week poses, as well as painting and drawing demos. Please be prepared with a few primed canvases or boards for the first class, and be ready to paint!

Class Info.

Dates: July 9th – Aug. 27th
Fridays from 9:00am – Noon
Cost: $290 + $35 model fee
Location: Talent Studios – Talent, OR

To sign-up for class & for supply list email: artist@artofgabriel.com.

Debut du Siecle Update

editor — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 22:44:35 +0000

The debut du siecle event was a great success. Check out the photos of the models and the final piece.

The final painting after 3 hours!

Debut du Siecle Exhibit

editor — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:46:50 +0000

Friday, June 4, 2010 – 5:00 – 8:00pm at Tease Restaurant – 303 E. Main, Ashland, OR 97520

An Art Happening! Have you ever dreamed of sitting in a French cafe, sipping wine, listening to the hum of a violin, and watching artists create! This is Debut du Siecle! This month’s featured artist Gabriel Mark Lipper will have his artwork on display and he will be painting an original piece during the exhibit. Offer… him a cocktail and the painting may just include you! For more info go to www.teaseashland.com

Gabriel Updated

editor — Thu, 27 May 2010 19:23:18 +0000

Gabriel Mark Lipper spent much of the early part of his career traveling and exploring his subjects. Several painting trips to Italy and other parts of Europe inspired paintings of decaying cityscapes and ageing fishermen. “The beauty that I discovered on my travels is still overwhelming. It left an impression.” Whether backpacking alone, with his wife along the Cinque Terre, or peddling through the red clay roads of the Tuscan hills with a friend, Gabriel was always painting.

Closer to home, Lipper became fascinated by the aggressive lifestyle of the rodeo cowboys and ranchers in his home state of Oregon. Lipper’s sold out one-man show “National Cowboy” drew parallels between these men and the U.S soldiers at war. In his painting “Exit Strategy”, thick backgrounds of ocher surround a black bull and its red white and blue rider as a rodeo clown crouches at the ready. The paintings are direct and vivid with bits of Gabriel’s signature purple line work showing through. “As a kid, I grew up across the road from a field with a couple of cattle framed in a barbed wire fence.” Gabriel muses. “This series brought me back to that dirt road.

Lipper’s latest series of paintings “Urban Legend” is on ongoing look at the superficial beauty and excess of contemporary culture. “I host cocktail parties and paint the people who show up,” says Lipper. Lipper’s ability to “paint the people who show up”, translates into brilliant paintings filled with lush color, brushwork, and evocative mood. His figures are beautifully rendered with strong light and confident form, a nod to his academic background, but Lipper’s compositions and subjects are anything but academic. His paintings seduce viewers into an opulent world of decadence and longing. Searching eyes and empty glasses engage and at the same time dismiss. The backgrounds dance with heavy impasto paint and heady color allowing for his narrative subjects to exist in an environment of painterly abstraction. “I’ve always been a bit of a voyeur. I travel to paint people and places I don’t know yet. I try to look closely and find out how much I can glean from their surfaces. Hopefully that opens up a door to understanding what’s inside.”

New European Prints Released

editor — Fri, 14 May 2010 00:31:47 +0000

The award winning painting The Last Hill along with a client favorite, Yellow Wall Blue Boat prints are now for sale. Please check out these new prints at http://artofgabriel.com/shop/.

New Term to Start Friday May 7th

editor — Tue, 04 May 2010 21:32:55 +0000

The next session will be an 8-week session starting May 7th going until June
25th. The class is Fridays from 9:00am to noon, at Talent Studios.

This session we will focus on painting from life. We will be painting from
nude models for the entire 8-weeks. The first and last class of the session
Gabriel will be doing painting and drawing demos. Please be prepared with a
few primed canvases or boards for the first class, and be ready to paint!

This 8-week session will be $290 plus a $35 modeling fee – payment is due by
the first class of the session.

Please sign-up by emailing me at artist@artofgabriel.com.

Happy Painting!

Thoughts about the state of art.

editor — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:17:44 +0000

This last week I was privileged to attend the Portrait Society of America’s annual convention. For the first time in my life I was able to meet many of what I believe to be the best living painters in the country. And so, in the wee hours of the morning, I find myself reflecting on what that experience has meant to me as a painter.
The paintings I saw were brilliant in their execution, the sensitivity to value, color, and form, impeccable. Some paintings went beyond this awe inspiring technique and tapped into the richness that for me is painting at its finest. I watched Rose Frantzen do three demos over the course of the week. Each time, as she spoke about her struggles with paint, insecurities about her approach, or the love of the process, her portraits tumbled onto the canvas and inevitably, revealed more about the sitters humanity than they did about the structure of their faces. This is what moved me, and this is what I enjoyed most.
It was this same humanity and connection to something honest, that I felt was missing in much of the work I saw. Alexey Steele repeatedly spoke to the question of “why?”, why do we paint what we paint? And for many artists today, I worry that that that question is not being asked. Perhaps the “realist revolution” astutely reflects the disconnected condition of so much of our society. As artists, the techniques we employ are simply the tools we use to build our paintings, sculptures, etc. Beyond the chosen technique is the substance of the painting. And much of the time, that substance, that intention, seems to be lacking. Are we painting studies, or are we going to paint paintings? If I have a soul, so should my painting. When intention and technique meet, the results are obvious and the paintings speak for themselves. If there is a disconnect somewhere in that process, we have yet another painting of an uncomfortable model sitting on a bit of drapery, or a perfectly rendered collection of thrift store items on a table. Even a camera gets uncomfortable in a situation like that.
There was some discussion about the fact that as contemporary artists we no longer have a language for the critical discussion of art. I’m not sure that I fully agree with this premise. The language has certainly changed. Lavender and pine cones carry very little allegorical weight these days. Does this mean that as artists we have lost the ability to communicate with our audience? I hope not.
The talent I witnessed at the PSoA was undeniable. I returned home with new brushes, new colors, and a renewed love for the craft of painting. I’ve been drawing furiously. Many of my paintings look back at me sadly knowing that they will no longer make the cut in my studio. My paintings will improve technically this is a given. Now, the goal is to make it mean something.

New Prints Available from the Chasing the Muse series

editor — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 23:37:37 +0000

New Prints Available from the Chasing the Muse series.

Theo and The Neighbor Mail, are now available online for purchase from our web store. Be the First to purchase one of these new prints!

Portrait Society of America

editor — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 19:42:43 +0000

Gabriel will be in Washington D.C. next week to celebrate The Art of the Portrait at the 12th Annual PSA Conference. Check out the Portrait Society of America website for more information.

Artist Teen Mentoring Project

editor — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:09:58 +0000

Artist Teen Mentoring Project Exhibit at the Rogue Gallery & Art Center April 16 – May 1.

Gabriel has two exceptional teens he has been mentoring for the past few months as they work on a large scale painting entitled Be the Change. The painting focuses on people in history who inspired non-violent social activism. Can you believe that these two kids never painted before this project!!!