Jeremy Lipking’s father was an advertising designer, children's book illustrator and landscape painter, and it was his father who gave him his first lessons in art and encouraged him to enroll in the California Art Institute. Lipking is a realist in the tradition of Sorolla, Sargent, and Swedish artist Anders Zorn, whose paintings of figures in a landscape inspire Lipking’s practice. For Lipking, the figure and landscape have to correlate in color, form, and in mystery. As he observed in an interview, ”The figure looks the way it does because of the landscape behind it, and the landscape looks the way it does because of the figure.” In Blue Bonnet, the gray dusty foliage echoes the overcast sky while the subtle indigo flowers find their counterpart in the pattern on the girl’s coat, in her velvet collar, and in her bonnet. The whole creates a triangle balanced by the girl’s windswept hair and downcast face and eyes. Lipking’s paintings keep you looking and finding, and that, perhaps, is the point of his realism.

-James D. Balestrieri