ART REVIEW : Landscapist Lipscomb Takes New Directions

Los Angeles landscape artist Mark Lipscomb has a smooth approach to paint; he moves it across canvas like a polished ballroom dancer. There is not the slightest trace of effort or strain in his paintings, yet as can be seen in the mini-retrospective of his work on view at the Long Beach Museum of Art through Nov. 5, he is always pushing his work in new directions.

A visual chronicle of the six-year period when Lipscomb moved away from the Renaissance perspective that governed his early work to what he describes as “mass perspective,” the show doubles as a love letter to Los Angeles; the leitmotif of this show is the sensuality of the urban sprawl that surrounds Angelenos as far as the eye can see. Free of traffic, Lipscomb’s unpopulated landscapes lay bare the network of streets that hold the city together and revel in the undulating rhythms of curving roads.

Attempting to foster what he describes as “a more complete way of seeing,” Lipscomb intends that his paintings convey how a given environment feels rather than how it looks. He wants to create gestalts rather than a series of flat surfaces to be studied, and on the whole he achieves that goal in these highly atmospheric paintings. Like David Hockney--another painter known for his ability to capture the L.A. vibe--Lipscomb reduces objects so that they read as flat shapes weighted with heavy shadows. Residing in a realm eternally drowsy with the thick, heavy sunlight of late afternoon, Lipscomb’s work looks very West Coast, and he underscores that quality with a Southwestern palette built around rosy pink, gray and pale mint green.

Lipscomb’s paintings appear at a glance to be lyrical interpretations of uneventful scenes, yet there is something feverish about these empty, utterly ordinary streets. Something menacing seems to be percolating under the neatly trimmed hedges. This mood of uneasiness is particularly evident in his earlier work, which gives off a muted, luxuriant melancholy reminiscent of work by De Chirico and Edward Hopper. There’s an uncanny stillness to these scenes, a sense that these places have been evacuated or abandoned. The high-pitched whine of alarm that the paintings trigger is tempered by the strong graphic quality of Lipscomb’s technique. He applies paint in a bold, brushy way that yanks the observer out of illusionistic space and back to the surface of the canvas.

While Lipscomb cites De Kooning, Diebenkorn and Pollock as his central influences, his work looks to have its strongest ties with the Bay Area Abstractionists. That connection can be seen in Lipscomb’s opaque application of paint, the shapes and colors he favors and, most particularly, in the emotional themes he communicates in his handling of light.

Lipscomb had quite a bit of academic training and, at a certain point, the challenge he faced was to let go of all he’d learned and get in touch with his own intuition. Toward that end, he evolved from a contemporary plein-air painter to an Abstract Expressionist; his new paintings have shed all vestiges of landscape and are built around a “mass perspective” that is neither linear, Cubist nor Abstract Expressionist, but rather, a bit of all three.

He is painting much larger now too, and his palette has grown much hotter. A blazing red that turns up sparingly in early work dominates a recent canvas. Most important, there has been a significant change in the mood of his work, which has taken on a crisp, industrial veneer and grown considerably busier. The enraptured lyricism of the early paintings has exploded into frenzied complexity.