Interview with landscape artist: Kathleen Lipinski

Kathleen Lipinski has been living in San Anselmo and capturing the light and shadow of our rolling Marin hills in her landscapes for 30 years. She shares her home with her husband, artist Steve Emery, and has a studio nearby in the Isabel Cook Building, -- once an elementary school and now an enclave for local artists.

Linda Kane Parker:   When did you begin to think of yourself as an artist?

Kathleen:  When I was a Squirt.  I was always the kid who was drawing Mickey Mouse to make friends.

Kathleen grew up in Detroit in a family that had no interest in or awareness of art. Without encouragement, she enrolled in an alternative public high school that specialized in the Arts and Sciences and much of her academic training and work in realism started in there. She studied commercial design, not imagining any other way for an artist to make a living.

When she came to California to visit her sister in 1968 it changed her life. 

Kathleen: Let's see, college in Ohio or San Francisco? Hmmmm.

It was a great time then to be in the city, all the music was happening and I had never seen anything as beautiful as California. My visit is pretty much what tipped it. After my sister took me to Stinson, Yosemite, and all up and down the coast, I was in love with the landscape and the culture. So, I forfeited a scholarship in Ohio, moved to San Francisco, and started attending College of Marin.

Part of what California did for me was it made me think about what I wanted to do with the technical skills I learned in high school. I hadn't asked myself what was my voice in art.

After College of Marin, I attended UC Santa Cruz. I found that anytime I was confused about who I was or what I was doing I would take myself outside to paint. I had a natural tendency to work in landscape that I did not embrace immediately because it seemed too traditional in the face of all the wild art that as a college student was happening around me.

I met my husband Steve at UC Santa Cruz and after graduation we came back to Marin to Steve's family home in San Anselmo and I have been working in landscape ever since.

LKP:  How did you develop your unique style?

Kathleen:  I had fallen in love with printmaking in college and when I took my first silk screening class I found that I could capture what I had been trying to do in painting. Silk screening is a layering process that gives the effect of Japanese wood blocks where you have receding ridges going back in space. So, when we moved into this house in 1979, we turned our two-car garage into a printmaking studio. Steve had a background in printmaking as well, so we began pulling my editions and I produced silk-screened limited edition prints for the next 15 years.

LKP:  What is the process like, working as a printmaker?

Kathleen:  It is very labor intensive as every color needs a separate stencil and is printed individually.  It would take two to three months to create an edition of prints.

LKP:  What influenced the transition you made to painting after 15 years as a printmaker?

Kathleen:  I wanted to do bigger more complicated pieces, so eventually I thought, "I could just paint!" Even though I had created a market in printmaking, it was freeing once I made the switch.

Kathleen sells Giclée prints of her larger paintings and some of her limited edition silk-screened prints are still available. She has been enjoying working on commissions lately enabling her to travel and reimagine unfamiliar landscapes. An office building in Salt Lake City commissioned her largest piece yet at 8 ft x 14 f. and a couple in Hawaii commissioned a painting of Kohala Mountains. See more of her work on her website.