Malcolm Liepke and Me

One of my all-time favorite artists is an artist by the name of Malcolm Liepke.  I was first introduced Liepke when I was in high school in the 1980s.  One of my teachers a guy named Irwin Greenberg also known as "Greeny" which I was work by different artists who he thought were really cool.  Alongside Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and John Singer Sargent, Malcolm "Skip" Liepke was one of those artists who did a lot of beautiful things with a low-key pallette, muted color, and six quick passages of paint that I really admired.

Malcolm Liepke
Flowers In Her Hair, 2011  

His wonderful up close portraits in which he sort of stylize is the faces, even as colors stylized, and the creamy passages of paint, add an immediate presence to the faces.  It's almost like the paint is skin.

Malcolm Liepke
Cascading Hair

 I also really like some of the counterbalancing curves that he adds into the anatomy.  There is a gestural quality to as figures that one can't beat.  I even think the hair has a quality to it.  That's like that.  There are these little bravura touches that are very similar to something that Rembrandt might do.  The highlight on a nose in the peoples of the, I and wonderful composition.

Lately I've been doing some paintings especially small portraits that are inspired by Malcolm Liepke, Sargent and Rembrandt.  I'm also incorporating a little bit of a fashion magazine sense to it and maybe even a little bit of the pinup aesthetic.

Terri Bull, oil paint masonite panel 10"x8" Buy this on Etsy	R.T. Fischl, oil on masonite panel 7"x5" Buy this on Etsy	click images to enlarge
Jen U. Wein, 6"x6" oil on masonite Buy this on Etsy	E. Lucy Daite,  6"x6" oil on masonite Buy this on Etsy