Pat Lipsky - Influences

Influences

While Lipsky is sometimes identified with the Post-Painterly Abstraction school centered around the critic Clement Greenberg, a long-time friend of the painter, others have disputed this view. In a 2007 interview, Lipsky listed a broad range of influences, from outside the field of visual arts:

"I'm interested in what 'difference' means. My reading of Proust and Eliot, my viewing of Bellini and Giorgione and Titian and Albers and Cornell and Pollock, my listening to Bach and Thelonious Monk, my liking Eric Rohmer and Monty Python might seem totally unrelated, but they teach the same lesson: differences matter. When Monk plays a single note instead of another, a piece is either saved or ruined. When Albers puts a white next to a yellow, the yellow is changed—and the white is changed too. If Proust chooses to follow one character instead of another, to write fifty pages instead of four, the reader's experience is altered in the most intimate and immediate way. We look at works of art as single large units—but they’re actually composed of hundreds, of thousands of individual and tiny units, each one a decision. It’s those units that I’ve been experimenting with throughout my career."

Lipsky has also discussed the influence of first-generation abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, along with second-generation painters like Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, as well as her mentor, Tony Smith.