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.”
