Press

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.