Marla Lipkin

I look for light; that quality of light that defines the mood, that describes the landscape, whether it’s overcast, brilliant, or the setting sun. We get a different effect, always different and quite inspiring. It’s always like that when I go to The Cape. From the tip of Provincetown, by the rocks that take you to the sandbar where Long Point Light resides, that is a wonder of light. Fifty miles out at sea, this is a place of very magical light. I’ve painted many works from there – all are different, yet they are from the same location – just a slight turn of the head – and you see the dunes, violet at dusk. Straight ahead, and you get the reds and oranges flying off the water! Or, the most brilliant blue sky with hugh puffs of clouds riding high – all reflected in the marsh at high tide.

The northeast coast is a great adventure to paint. But it’s not the tightly realist canvas that I’m after. It’s the personal and emotional relationship I feel for what I’m looking at as an artist – abstracted and interpreted. I want you to feel like you can walk into that landscape, feel the air, the grass blowing in the wind, engulfed in the light. I want you to know the place, as I do.

Biography

Marla Lipkin was born in the Bronx in New York City. She still lives in New York, with her studio in Long Island City. She graduated from Music and Art High School, went onto The Cooper Union School of Art, Architecture and Engineering, where she studied painting with Paul Resika, Leland Bell and Marcia Marcus. The artist also has a Masters from Hunter College.

Ms. Lipkin has enjoyed several residencies. Her earliest – while still at Cooper Union was at the Provincetown Workshop, where she studied with Victor Candell and Leo Manso. When she graduated from Cooper, Ms. Lipkin went to the South of France for the winter/spring residency at the Michael Karolyi Foundation in Vence. Since then, she has been invited more than once to the Edna Saint Vincent Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, NY.

Traveling to Cape Cod and Southern Maine are her most constant sources of material and inspiration. On recent visits to the Florida Keys, the small mangrove islands at sea have caught her imagination. She is currently working on a series of Island at Sea paintings which capture deep turquoise waters and fantastic late day light. Ms. Lipkin continues to work on her passion of exploring light near to or by the sea, whether it’s the northeast or the southern Atlantic.

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