Pat Lipsky is a forthright, decisive presence - in conversation and especially on canvas. She orients herself towards the result, not very concerned with the weeds of the process; her goal is to do justice to color, and she would easily convince you to pay respect to it in the same way that she does; and she is loyal to her hometown – the city of New York, which she is a strong advocate for. Pat Lipsky knows herself so well: perhaps, because her work is so resolute and clear, but also because she has been a painter for over 60 years now, and had to stand her ground the entire time. In this interview, I learned she is now shy about that knowledge, but in control of it – an aspiration for a young artist like myself.
Pat was born in New York in 1941. She studied Fine Art at Cornell University, then got an MFA in Painting from Hunter College. Her paintings span self-portraiture and more toned-down or strictly geometric compositions, but much of her artwork are striking canvases with color fields, combined and lined up together in patterns of waves or lines. I wanted to interview her, as my interest in color is relevant in my own practice, and I am always wondering how much we can rely on color to communicate. Would it tell the world anything about itself, or would it only bring out the inside of the artist? Should I attempt to command color or let it be and resign to responding to its vague, yet powerful call?
Pat Lipsky’s painting George is a part of the Harvard Art Museums’ collection, and I had a spirited encounter with it, learning what color field work can inspire at the scale of 90 1/4 by 113 inches. In the Art Study Center, where it was put out for display on request, I found myself evaluating the genuineness of my day-to-day attention to color, making promises to myself, and drawn to Carpenter Center studios right that moment, eager to start working on a painting myself. This year, Pat Lipsky released a book, Brightening Glance, in which her first big shows, memorable advice from the titans of the industry and passerby heroes, and her philosophies on going through every day of her life as an artist are all rubbing shoulders in a warmly recalled New York, in an iteration that is gone, but I indulged in dreaming about. Pat and I talked online, as she was sitting in her studio, and I - in my college dorm. We were both bathed in the white light of a cloudy day, coming through our windows (as the weather seemed to be the same in Boston and New York), and I was nervous, but deeply intrigued.
Varya: I want to start with a very naive thing: expressing my excitement. I'm a baby, only 21, and I grew up in Russia. When I learned about the New York art scene in the '60s and the '70s it seemed almost like a myth that's so far away, both in space and time. But it was infinitely exciting, and so many of my aspirations, my first encounters with freedom, and my desire to demand it came from learning about this scene. Talking to you today is a bit surreal. This is why I wanted to ask what it was like to make art in that moment, when the art world was being revised and uprooted, challenged in some ways. Did you realize at the time how big a thing you're part of? How does it compare to working as an artist now?
Pat: It's no different at all. Exactly the same. I'm now older, but I don't stand around thinking about the art world. When I'm painting, I'm just in my studio. One difference is that I have an assistant. I didn't use to have an assistant. I used to do all those paintings on the floor myself. Making a painting is always hard physically. I only started painting really seriously in the late 60s, when I just graduated from Cornell in '63, and then I went to Hunter graduate school. I just started painting in a studio in New York around '68, and I had a very fast rise.
I never had a terrible apprentice period. I had some terrible periods, but they weren't apprentice. Painting in your studio is a fascinating experience. Being in a studio is a great privilege. Every day when I walk into the room, I feel lucky. Every single day - it doesn't go away. I just think, “Wow, this is my room, my space. I can do what I want. What an accomplishment.” Mostly, as you probably saw, I'm very interested in color, how colors interact, and I'm forging ahead with paintings that I think are new, based on Rothko and Morris Lewis.
Varya: I love hearing you talk about your studio - I feel the same, and I get really excited by having an art-only territory in my life because I’m a student. Studio space is so special - you don't just live there, it's a bit bigger than that. But how do you treat it? What kind of things do you put in there?
Pat gets up, and I can see the big space behind her in more detail - there appears to be a window to her right. The room is mostly white, and Pat is showing me a huge table that was behind her back the whole time.
Pat: Okay, well, this is the table back here, and then the wall is back here. This is the viewing wall, and then the windows - they face the Hudson. And I have all the paint on the table. I would have 10 or 12 colors. I would mix all the colors beforehand and just start painting. But I get a little nervous, actually, when I talk about my painting process, so I'd rather not do that, if you don't mind.
Varya: Yeah, of course. The setup looks incredible. Have you been in the same studio for a long time?
Pat: I've been in this studio since 1998. I guess that's a long time, longer than you've been alive, right? It’s very hard to get a studio now. It didn't used to be so hard. It became a much bigger deal to get a studio in New York around the 90s, which is unfortunate, because it takes away some of the vitality of the art scene. People who are good at painting have trouble getting a space. And if you don't have a space, you can't even function.
Varya: I wanted to pry a bit about these troubles, if you don’t mind. I was reading your writing (this one piece, titled A Good Painter ... for a Woman which you published in 2022) about your experience in the scene and spaces that are steeped in hierarchical relationships as a female artist. I don't know if that's still important for you to think or talk about, but I was very touched, feeling lucky to be walking a path that’s been laid beforehand.
Did your experience as a woman in the field change at all? How was working back in the day in your painting style - one that felt revolutionary? Throughout history, I feel, not everyone's been offered that opportunity to make a revolutionary statement, because if you are seen as lacking authority, your experiments and breakthroughs can be read just as deviations or mistakes. How do you make your way through that?
Pat: I think it has to do with personality and character. It didn't seem like that big a deal to me. Quite frankly, I'm just telling you the truth. I know people rev this up, and I could certainly rev it up right now, but I'm choosing not to, because it's not the truth. The truth is, I got a lot of attention immediately. I had some very exciting paintings, and the market responded to my paintings right then, in the late 60s and 70s. So I didn't experience this whole thing about women's lib and how terrible it is, and I'm crying in the corner, and nobody cares. I don't believe it. I think it's nonsense.
I'm not touting myself, but look at Virginia Woolf. She's an incredible role model. Virginia Woolf never had a bad day. She was emotionally disturbed at different times, but she was an outstanding woman, and she got attention immediately. Nobody rejected her article; she was publishing constantly, and the whole Bloomsbury group, in some ways, centered on her and her sister. Where's the sob story? So I resent all that. I think it's goo. That's all I can say about that.
Varya: What do you like of Virginia Woolf’s? She's one of my favorite writers - I am so in love with her humor and her acumen about the social dynamics, but her trouble and her distress, too.
Pat: She just writes beautifully. I love her book Moments Of Being. I read it a few times, even though I am not the type of person to re-read books, that's how much I like it. Her insight, her jokes, her tone. She's one of my favorite writers. She and Proust, and she loved Proust also.
She's a thrilling person to have lived and to have in our history. And I don't mean our history as women, but I just mean our history generally. I thought it got psychopathic when women, who weren't good artists or good writers, started carrying on about how they've been rejected. Look, it might be true. I didn't experience it, not that I've had such an incredible career, but I just didn't experience that, as far as I could tell.
Varya: As you are making a painting, what's in the back of your mind? Is what you're reading in conversation with what you end up making? You are mentioning these incredible texts - is your work informed by them?
Pat: I wish my work was informed by my reading, but it's not at all. It's informed by me. I simply stand at that table or on the floor and start painting - I don't have a plan. But I'm influenced by other paintings, for instance, by how Morris Lewis set up a canvas. So it's more like shop talk, if you know what I mean. “How did so and so handle this particular problem in terms of space on the canvas?”
But of course, I'm aware that there's a historical framework to anything that's made, very different in 2025 and in 1974, and Baudelaire made that point extremely well. He talked about the timely and the eternal. He said that there are two elements in art, the timely and the eternal. The eternal is that your work has to connect with the work of the past. The timely part has to be of the moment. It has to express its time as well. I'm aware of that idea, and I agree with it.
Varya: It's a very interesting formula. And I don't know if, when you were at the Harvard Art Museums, you saw that self-portrait by Max Beckmann - it is one of my favorite works at our museums, and the curators put it straight in your line of sight. As you walk into the German division, that's the first thing you see. And that work - Self-Portrait In Tuxedo - is a huge symbol of its time, 1927 Germany, when modernity is much more threatening than it is promising, and the future is so precarious that you barely even want to think about it, yet you must. It is extremely simple and embodies a very particular moment, but is also eternal, quite frankly.
Pat: He's a fantastic artist. You pick somebody I really love, and I have a very close feeling towards. His painting called The Journey is one of the first paintings that I responded to when I was around 13. I don't paint like him at all, but he manages to have a lot of emotion without being corny or overdone. I thought that painting was a masterpiece. And I still think that now, whereas some of my early picks, I'm not too interested in it. Are you familiar with that painting?
Varya: Yes! Max Beckmann’s self-portrait that I mentioned earlier is on my tour of the museums - I work as a student guide. So I had to go through a lot of backlogs, history, and Beckman’s entire body of work.
You were just 13, you said, when you had that strong response. To me, the response to a work of art is such a striking experience sometimes that I feel in my body that I will remember it for the rest of my life. What you are saying now, recalling your 13-year-old self, is proving my suspicion to be true. What was that response to Beckmann that you had? Or how do you respond to a painting? Is that intellectual or emotional, or do you feel it in your body as well?
Pat: I remember all my responses. The other painting I liked was Delaunay. Robert Delaunay, I think it's called Disc. It's a Tondo, and it has discs in color. I could see why I like that. It was just abstract color, and maybe he was the only one doing that in the 20s in France, so I liked it for a different reason. The Beckman was very vibrant and vital, and also reserved at the same time. That's what excited me, because the middle panel is very reserved and holds back, whereas the two side panels are very disturbing.
Varya: You are right - Beckmann is a contradiction, and a deeply productive one. I was listening to what you had to say on beauty in a conversation with Jennifer Samet at the Eric Firestone Gallery in 2023, and you had this sort of idea, and correct me if I'm wrong, of recognition through time and confirmation of something that's beautiful by the time that it had been existing for, by the time that it’s existed for and recognized for. How do you think that maps onto the fact of not being recognized by chance? For instance, you were saying that people cannot get studios right now, right? How do those two things interact in your understanding of what's beautiful?
Pat: I'm not the first person to say that if somebody doesn't get a studio, that's their problem. I'm not going to think about it for one second. They shouldn't be in the field. That's one of the steps. If you can't do that, this is not the right field for you. There are difficulties in all fields. That's a difficulty that has to be surmounted. There are many talented people, but that's only the beginning, because you have to have perseverance, you have to have ambition, you have to know how to talk to people, and you have to know how to talk about your work. I mean, there are many factors to being successful. What every person wants is to be recognized and to have people interested in what they're doing. Since I've devoted my whole adult life, along with other things, like being a mother, to painting, I want some of the rewards, both financial and literary, and it's just normal.
You know, beautiful is a dirty word in the art world. You shouldn't say beautiful because it seems too highfalutin. No, no, not highfalutin. It seems too fancy and dated. But Kant is the one who said that we aim for the beautiful. We don't aim for the pretty. We aim for the beautiful. And when we aim for the beautiful, we think that others will agree with us if our assessment is correct. So it also takes the judgment of other people who are equally capable of deciding what beauty is.
I'm going for beauty. Now, that's a big stake. I'm not saying I'm achieving it, but I never went for anything else the whole time I ever did this. I just wanted to make a beautiful painting. And for me, the beautiful painting meant that the colors were going to work together. Now, believe me, that's not easy: I could combine four colors, but when I approach the fifth, I can be stuck. In other words, that's a statement of where I think art is. Now, do I think most art now has anything to do with that? No, I have no idea what art has to do with at this moment. I see it, and I think it's terrible - it's some very misguided scene.
Also, I'm not interested in the process at all. There's only one thing that interests me, and that is the result. So a lot of people are showing now in galleries in New York, and the whole thing is about how many layers of paint they put on, and do they chip the paint off. Who cares? What does the painting look like? Painting is visual. You know, I also write, but I know writing is not painting. In order for paintings to succeed, they have to succeed visually. Those are the stakes, but they are often ignored.
Varya: Thank you for bringing up your writing. Your texts are really precise. In them, I found a commitment to documentation that is factual and accurate. But your visual work is an abstraction, and it's not descriptive. I was wondering how those two things interact, and if you borrow from one of those forms into another. Do you think precision and abstraction are innate to those media in any way, or do you intertwine them somehow?
Pat: I don't think my writing and my painting are really connected. Writing feels different and comes from a different part than painting, and painting feels more like the way Pollock described it: you have to be in touch with yourself. You become the painting. There's no separation between you and the painting. You're in the painting. You have to have that ability to be in the painting. You also want to be in the writing, so that could be a similarity. But with writing, it's all those words, and you have to know the words and then know how to use them. Whereas in painting, you could say, the colors are the words. It feels totally different because you're using your body in painting, and in writing, you are really using your mind, but it has nothing to do with your body's movements. It's an interesting question.
Varya: I love that division through the body. I didn't really think of it that way, but it's true! I was asking the question because sometimes, when I start making something, I struggle to forego the precision that I try to have in my writing, and I try to overexplain and be almost mathematical about my art. And I don't want it and don't know how to parcel those things out. You think, as your body changes, then that has an effect on your work as well, on your visual work?
Pat: It doesn’t. I was just writing different things that happened to me, and I loved writing them because it felt like a great relief to get the stuff out. I was totally influenced by Proust, because Proust said that anything that isn't written is like a negative waiting to be developed. And that idea really hit home with me, and so I wanted to develop my negatives.
Varya: In your piece for The New Criterion - Alone in a Room, you have a line that I was taken by. You said for you, colors are like people. I think that's a really beautiful allegiance to color. You also wrote that the only kind of books on color that you're interested in are histories of pigments and the material aspects of color. Is this information on materiality ever influencing your choices, or is this the information that is encoded in any way in your painting, or if you care to know the history of the color that you use in the painting as if it were a person? Or maybe it is entirely different, and it is an emotional connection and a friendship, in a way that you care about the character of the color, and not so much about its history?
Pat: I would say I'm writing the book of color. Hanging around here, in my studio, every day, and working with yellow, and then putting yellow next to red. But then what kind of yellow? What kind of red? All that has a mystical quality, and it also feels like alchemy, like the Middle Ages. I'm standing here and mixing colors, testing the colors, and then I'm seeing what colors are going to work in the painting together. I am using color to create moods and feelings in other people. I am trying to connect with other people through the use of color.
Now, I had a painting called Emanate, and it just had four colors. A lot of my best paintings just happened very quickly. I don't rework them or anything. It just hit that particular time. I don't even remember. Maybe I had yellow and red, and it was just very, very clear. So I just felt intuitively where and how to put those four colors together, and it has a quality that you can't put into words. The whole thing is, kind of wordless, like I didn't use words. And when you look at it, you don't have to use words either.
It is very common with children, you know, that they'll make up colors for their parents. I thought my father was brown, my mother, I thought, was definitely red. In abstraction, colors are taken out of their naturalistic context and become independent. That's the big change that happened in art around post-Impressionism – color suddenly became the subject. And then Paul Klee made that beautiful remark: “color and I are one”. It's fascinating because people are quite insensitive to color for the most part. Think of how you're walking around, and everything is color. Your room is color, and yet, most people are just kind of blind.
Varya: Do you have a color for yourself?
Pat: Gold? (Pat laughs) No, no, yeah.
Varya: I wanted to ask also about the painting that I saw of yours at the Harvard Art Museums - George. We have it in storage now, but I know they brought it out so you could look at it, and so I had a chance to meet it as well. Yeah, I was looking at it in the Art Study Center, and it was so big that I was experiencing it much more as an object, than as an image. Huge and incredible. And the whole room becomes a part of it in a way, an extension of my experience of the work. It is so frequent for me in the interactions with art to struggle to figure out where an artwork ends, because it would consume a significant chunk of the “real” world around it and render it necessary for this aesthetic experience. Do you have an idea of where your artwork would end as you are painting?
Pat: I'd love to talk about that. A thought I've had for a while is that art is frozen time, and when I look at it, I don't remember painting the picture. I remember the room. I painted it in a basement in a building on 88th Street in Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, where I lived. I talked the landlord into giving me a space so I could paint there, because I had two children. They were upstairs with the nanny, and I was downstairs painting, painting. And it was a small room, but I was doing these very big paintings. When I looked at the painting that you are talking about – I just saw it three weeks ago at your museum – I thought it was a very ambitious painting, obviously, because of the scale. I loved the size. I have a photograph of me looking at the painting that my assistant took. I'm just a person in the room looking at a very large painting. What's impressive to me about the painting is that I really got the colors right. I would never use that flamboyant palette now, but every color works in that painting. No color jumps out, no color misbehaves. It shows a huge ability to control many different colors. I don't even count how many different colors. I mean, it shows chutzpah. I don't know if you know what chutzpah means. It's a Yiddish word for courage. It shows a chutzpah to make that big a painting with that many colors. I think they should hang it. So this was just a very early painting when I had no career, no name recognition, and I was painting in the basement. And that's why I have no interest in people who can't put it together. I found a basement studio, which was awful. And then very quickly, I got some interest in my work. But you have to be in New York City. We pay a huge price here in New York, but we understand that we can't be anywhere else, because that's where the art world is.
Varya: In America, or in general, you think?
Pat: This is just a fact. If you were an ambitious artist in the Renaissance, you had to go to Florence. You didn't stay in some little town in Italy. You had to go where the action was. And during the period of 1900s, you had to go to Paris. You didn't stay in upstate New York. That's the art world. That's always been the case. In Greece, you had to go to Athens. In other words, there's always a center where the most ambitious art is current. And yes, you have to go to New York. Doesn't mean you have to stay there permanently. I mean, I wouldn't leave, but it's the nature of art history: for whatever reason, there's always a center where the people most interested in art flock, where the dealers are, where the money are, where the cathedrals or palaces are, and those are the places everyone’s going to because, as my friend Clement Greenberg said, art is connected to money with a golden umbilical cord.
Varya: I have a question on the material nature of things. You said that you can't replicate your paintings exactly because the same materials are different now due to the source and the production techniques. And I found that very interesting, because, obviously, I've only experienced the materials of the present, the 21st century. And didn't think about it that much, which I definitely should have. But I wonder what the role of the material in what image it can create in your work is?
Pat: The material is part of the work. Very important choices that didn't exist 200 years ago. You worked on linen. The linen was primed. You worked with oil paint. Then new kinds of paint came in. Are you going to use acrylic paint rather than oil paint? Then you could use raw canvas, which is what I use. And so the materials are big choices that will lead to a certain kind of look in the painting. And I wasn't aware, perhaps, of how significant that would be. In the past 50 years, the paint changed, and the canvas changed. In other words, I just can't get it. It doesn't exist. Now, very few people know the cotton duck. Pollock is the one who rolled out the cotton duck on the floor, and he started painting. It's not the same. The cotton duck is made in India. It used to be made in the United States. It doesn't have the same stitching. The old version doesn't exist anymore. None of us, nobody thought of it. If you're working on linen that didn't change too much, you would still get the linen. You could still get the linen from Belgium, but certainly not the cotton that Americans used – it's quite different.
Varya: It is fascinating to think of – this thing, it's just gone. The possibility of making it is just gone. It has transformed in such a subtle, yet monumental way - the same artwork could never be made again. The last question I have is returning to your work at the Harvard Art Museums. Do you remember making it what you were thinking about, and what was the time in your life when you were making it? What were the days that surrounded that work like?
Pat: I was coming in after the abstract expressionists. And believe me, had pop art come before me, I would never even have gone into the field, because I hate pop art. But the abstract expressionists were the dominant factor. And as I understood it, in New York and in America, they painted big, and it just seemed completely appropriate to paint big, and you couldn't do the same things small that you could do big. It appealed to me, and I had a natural ability to do that, so it was not a problem. I couldn't paint on the floor in that horrible room in the basement, so I had four stools with seats, no tops, and I had the painting over the four stools, each corner on one stool, and I had to reach into the middle. I, truthfully, am not sure how I got to the middle.
I was very interested in color, and the wave format was something that nobody else did. I did it very naturally. I happened to grow up next to the beach in Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn. I understand the beach. I'm not saying this is the reason, but it could just be that I had the waves in my mind all the time from my earliest childhood. So automatically, I used the wave format to put the color down. And also, women are curving.
2026