Art Dealer Diaries Podcast · Mark Sublette

Jeremy Lipking: American Realist Painter - Epi. 365, Host Dr. Mark Sublette

October 1, 2025·1 hr 1 min·5 clips

Host Mark Sublette reveals why he compares painter Jeremy Lipking to masters like John Singer Sargent.

1. Art Dealer Diaries host Dr. Mark Sublette interviews American realist painter Jeremy Lipking at the Far West show in Austin, Texas. 2. Sublette introduces Lipking as a figurative and landscape painter he has compared publicly to John Singer Sargent and Joaquin Soroya, whose work consistently draws him in emotionally. 3. The episode traces Lipking's biography from a Southern California childhood through early adulthood in Mammoth Lakes to his first commercial gallery breakthrough in Los Angeles. 4. Lipking grew up in Mar Vista and Simi Valley with an illustrator father who kept art books, supplies, and a home studio, which Lipking credits as providing access and normalizing art as a career option. 5. Despite drawing constantly, Lipking did not remember being the best artist in class and did not identify painting as his path until after high school, when music and guitar competed for his creative attention throughout his teens. 6. At approximately 18, Lipking moved to Mammoth Lakes in the Eastern Sierras with his girlfriend and their son, working at a hardware store while snowboarding in winter and rock climbing in summer. 7. In Mammoth Lakes, Lipking's father introduced him to California Impressionists Edgar Payne and William Wendt; Lipking began selling watercolor mountain sketches and, briefly, chainsaw-carved wooden sculptures at a local furniture-and-gallery store. 8. The chainsaw carving enterprise ended when apartment neighbors complained about noise; Lipking still has parents who kept two of the carvings. 9. After returning to Southern California, Lipking discovered John Singer Sargent's portraits and decided he wanted to learn to draw a face that avoided the 'uncanny valley'; a friend's notebook of Richard Schmidt photographs showed him that someone alive was still painting the figure at that level. 10. Through his father, Lipking found Glen Orbeck's class at the California Art Institute, where he encountered peers his own age producing figure drawings that looked like they came from 19th-century Paris, naming Greg Probe and Morgan Weisling as the advanced students whose wall drawings set his benchmark. 11. Orbeck left the school about a year into Lipking's enrollment; Lipking transitioned to both taking and teaching classes simultaneously while continuing to paint the figure and landscape from life. 12. After accumulating five or six paintings he considered consistent in quality and subject matter — a process he says took about a year — Lipking drove to Laguna Beach to approach galleries. 13. The first gallery he tried buzzed him in but told him he needed a written portfolio submission and an appointment, turning him away after a two-and-a-half-hour drive. 14. At Redfern Gallery next door, dealer Ray Redfern was on his way out for a hair appointment, saw one painting, canceled the appointment, and bought the entire group — what Lipking calls 'probably the biggest check I'd ever seen.' 15. Lipking's first solo show followed at Mooresburg Gallery in West Hollywood, where he sold all 15 to 20 figurative and landscape paintings, describing it as 'pretty successful.' 16. Lipking describes using photography for larger, more complex studio paintings because it eliminates time pressure from changing light and model fatigue, allowing him to sit back and make slower creative decisions. 17. He discusses painting family — his wife and children — as both convenient (always available as models) and demanding (he knows their faces better than they do, raising his own standard for likeness). 18. Sublette reveals in his pre-interview remarks that Lipking is a quarter Native American, which came out during the conversation and is not something Lipking has previously talked about publicly. 19. Artists who paint representational figures, landscapes, or Western subjects — particularly those interested in the California Impressionist lineage and Sargent's influence on contemporary painting — will find this a dense and specific conversation. 20. Listeners looking for technical tutorials or demo footage will not find them here; this is a biographical and philosophical conversation, best supplemented by watching the video version on YouTube.

As heard by us

A sincere, craft-centered conversation that keeps the artist's sensibility at the center.

Jeremy Lipking comes across as an artist widely admired for the way he balances craft, feeling, and the challenge of turning an inner image into something others can see. Dr.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a painterly conversation that stays close to the studio and the person behind the work.

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