On view at the Booth Western Art Museum this summer is a retrospective featuring more than 30 works painted by Jeremy Lipking (b. 1975) over the last 30 years. Lipking depicts landscapes and still lifes, but he has won the loudest applause for images of young women and children posed in iconic landscapes of the American West.
Though he now lives in the mountains, Lipking grew up in Los Angeles’s urbane artistic community. He grew interested in art through his father, the illustrator Ronald Lipking, who taught him the basics, brought him to museums, and encouraged him to study his private collection of paintings by such Western masters as Frederic Remington and the Taos Society of Artists. The Lipking family spent many summers in the Eastern Sierra Mountains, where the boy could examine nature close-up while his father painted outdoors.
Lipking says those mountain experiences “had a profound effect on my admiration of nature, and also gave me a perspective on life that I might not have had growing up only in an urban environment.” In adulthood, he has learned still more about the Sierras and the other unspoiled regions he paints: “When you realize you are standing in the glacier’s path, when you see landscape in geological terms, your understanding becomes so much deeper, transcending aesthetic beauty alone.”
In 1997, Lipking began studying at the California Art Institute, drawing with the illustrators Glen Orbik and Norm Nason and benefiting from critiques offered by such masters as David A. Leffel and Max Turner. He learned to paint primarily on his own, gaining much inspiration from Richard Schmid’s bestselling book Alla Prima (1998), which underscores the significance of values and edges. (The two men painted side by side several times.) At age 25, Lipking won the top prize at the California Art Club’s 2001 Gold Medal exhibition with his painting Shady Grove, and his career took off.
Lipking is attuned to the important lessons that historical masters can offer, absorbing their imagery through books and visits to museums wherever he travels. He particularly appreciates such California impressionists as Edgar Payne, and also cosmopolitans like John Singer Sargent and Joaquín Sorolla. He has been favorably compared with the Swedish master Anders Zorn for his expertise in painting nudes outdoors.
Though he travels widely in the U.S. and abroad, Lipking’s heart remains firmly in the American West, and the Western art world has loved him right back. Just for example, he has won major awards in the Prix de West Invitational Art Sale & Exhibition at Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. (That first prizewinner is illustrated above.)
Booth Western Art Museum director of curatorial services Lisa Wheeler explains, “When I saw Lipking’s ‘Between the Past and Present’ at the 2016 Prix de West, I made it my goal to have an exhibition of his work at the Booth. I’m thrilled that, after 10 years, it is finally happening.”
Jeremy Lipking: 30 Years a Painter
Booth Western Art Museum
Cartersville, Georgia
boothmuseum.org
through August 16, 2026
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Story prepared for the web by Cherie Dawn Haas, Editor of Fine Art Today
