When beauty is enough

Painter Pat Lipsky gave a talk last night at the NY Studio School on "The Right Color."

Ms. Lipsky, whose work is mostly abstract and geometrical, gave a cool and elegant defense of painting as the formal practice of creating beauty. She quoted Mark Rothko, saying, "An expression of beauty is an expression of rightness."

"There has been a devaluation of beauty," Lipsky said, referring to a review by art critic Robert Hughes where he asked if creating beautiful objects is enough to make good art.

She recalled creating her early color field paintings in 1969, which were made by applying acrylic paint to wet canvas with sponges.

These were "one shot" paintings that she would do in one sitting in order to capture a particular spirit (and they were very big, some as long as ten feet or so).

If she made one of these paintings and it didn't work, she threw it away.

"There was nothing else to do with them," Lipsy said. "Either you hit it or you blew it."

A painter to the core, Lipsky gets excited at the technical details. She enthusiastically recalled creating over 100 different tones for her painting "Episcopalian Pandemonium," which is based on a watercolor she did. When she talked about switching from acrylic paint to oil, it felt like a moral choice.

Because she is so connected to materials, she has no time for conceptual art.

Talking about Marcel Duchamp putting a shovel on display as a piece of sculpture, Ms. Lipsky said the shovel is, to her mind, "the perfect instrument to handle his work."

Lipsky, looking elegant in a black suit, quoted Proust at one point during her talk. "I never saw the same sea twice," the French author said.

For Lipsky, we never see the same color twice. One color put beside others changes the value. Like the sea, color is very specific -- but very vast, too.

Pat Lipsky, Spiked Red, 1969