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In a memoir of her six-decade career, painter Pat Sutton Lipsky ’63 reflects on life, work, and the power of color

By Joe Wilensky

“My love of color—it’s an innate thing,” says Pat Sutton Lipsky ’63, who has been a prominent artist for more than a half century. “I have a feel for it, like you might have a feel for the piano.”

Lipsky is acclaimed as a “color field” painter—an abstract artist who uses expanses of color on canvas to, as she describes it, "create relations between variations and nuances of hue."

It’s a freezing-cold day in late January, and she’s sitting in her studio in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, surrounded by stacked canvases and dozens of paint cans. A large work in progress lies on a table in front of her, its bold stripes still wet in spots.

Pat Lipsky’s “Episcopalian Pandemonium” (1976) is held in the Johnson Museum's collection — Johnson Museum of Art

Lipsky likens her engagement with color to an oft-quoted 1914 diary entry by the German expressionist Paul Klee: “Color and I are one; I am a painter.”

“That’s sort of what it feels like,” she says. “I come here five days a week. It’s what I do, and I know how to do it. I’m very lucky that I am able to stand here, making paintings, and people are buying them. Amazing.”

I’m very lucky that I am able to stand here, making paintings, and people are buying them. Amazing.

Lipsky’s work is held in more than two dozen public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Cornell’s Johnson Museum.

She had her first solo exhibition in NYC in 1970; her most recent, “Color Next to Color,” was mounted in 2025.

Lipsky reflects on that long career in a recent memoir, Brightening Glance: Art and Life, published by University of Iowa Press in fall 2025.

“Some people are attracted to art for the chance to live like outlaws: outside the Monday and Friday margins, the hashmarks of nine and five. They do the minimum necessary work to qualify and really hope their lives will be the art,” she writes.

“I hadn’t come for the oddness of the art world. It was different for me at night: then I was as restless as anybody else. But my daytime model was Matisse, who painted in a business suit.”

Comprising a dozen and a half essays, the book touches on her childhood in Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach neighborhood; her schooling and early influences (including impressionist painter Paul Cézanne); and her travels, friendships, and mentorships—as well as a few romances—with noted members of the art world, including fellow artists, critics, and dealers.

“A praised abstractionist on canvas, Pat Lipsky on paper proves to be a sensitive portraitist, with an astonishing command of the figures who surrounded her,” says a review in the New Criterion, going on to call the book a “bittersweet and at times challenging depiction of art, love, and life.”

A praised abstractionist on canvas, Pat Lipsky on paper proves to be a sensitive portraitist, with an astonishing command of the figures who surrounded her.
The New Criterion

Lipsky majored in fine art in AAP, beginning her professional career as a young mother of two in the late 1960s, when NYC’s SoHo neighborhood was an artists’ haven, with vacant factories converted to vast studios.

A review of her memoir in Lilith Magazine lauds it for its feminist insights, noting that it explores “her experience as a female artist infiltrating highly influential, male-dominated spaces and describing life of creative ferment and motherhood.”

Lipsky also spends a chapter—titled “Comp. Lit.”—fondly recalling her years on the Hill.

Pat Sutton Lipsky ’63 in the Music Room at Willard Straight Hall in 1961, in a photo taken by her father — As an undergrad in the Straight’s Music Room, and in her SoHo studio in 1971.

Pat Sutton Lipsky ’63 in her SoHo studio in 1971 — As an undergrad in the Straight’s Music Room, and in her SoHo studio in 1971.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever loved a single place more,” she writes, describing the gorges, the campus, her academic pursuits, and her room on the top floor of Risley Hall.

She earned a BFA, but spent as much time as she could outside the studio.

“Cornell allowed me to develop my intellectual side, which I knew existed and which I wanted to focus on,” says Lipsky, who went on to earn an MFA from Hunter College.

“I deliberately chose not to go to an art school because I had too many other interests, and I didn’t want them to be ignored.”

Pat Sutton Lipsky ’63 and her assistant evaluate a painting in progress in her Chelsea studio — Joe Wilensky / Cornell University

Over her decades as an artist, Lipsky has refined and expanded her palette—exploring, she says, "the feeling that interacting colors can create."

Her style often takes the form of repeating waves, stripes, and bursts that emphasize each pigment’s physical presence.

Cornell allowed me to develop my intellectual side, which I knew existed and which I wanted to focus on.

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“The thing is to get the different colors carrying their own loads. (You don’t want a color overwhelming its neighbors.) If the mixture doesn’t pass muster, I add a little of this, a little of that, then dab it onto the canvas again,” she explains in her memoir.

“Usually there are several attempts before I’m ready to brush the new color on … The goal is a smooth, uninflected surface that doesn’t show any ‘hand.’”

Fields of Color: A Sampling of Lipsky's Work

(Story continues below)

Pat Lipsky’s “Springs Fireplace” (1969) — *Springs Fireplace*.

Pat Lipsky’s “For Leslie” (1974) — *For Leslie*.

Pat Lipsky’s “Lost Painting” (2023) — *Lost Painting*.

Pat Lipsky’s “Winged Fantasia” (2023) — *Winged Fantasia*.

Pat Lipsky’s “Chrysanthemum” (1971) — *Chrysanthemum*.

Pat Lipsky’s “Wooster III” (1974) — *Wooster III*.

In Lipsky’s studio, one artwork stands out among the many canvases, paints, and brushes: a plaster head, chipped and cracked with age.

It’s the only sculpture Lipsky ever made—created for a class under legendary Cornell art professor Jack Squier, MFA ’52.

“He was very intimidating,” she recalls, “and he almost failed me.”

a sculpted head in Pat Lipsky’s studio that she created for a class at Cornell in the early 1960s — Joe Wilensky / Cornell University

The assignment, she explains, was to sculpt the head of a classmate—and hers wasn’t going well.

With the deadline looming, Lipsky finally got the clay to take on female characteristics, even if it didn’t much resemble her subject.

She then completed the various steps to create a plaster cast, and left the project on the studio floor to set.

“In the morning, it wasn’t there,” she recalls. “Someone had mistakenly thrown it out.”

Panicked, Lipsky found a friend with a car and they sped to the city dump.

Searching under a steady snowfall, she found it—and passed the course.

“The fact that I retrieved it was so tremendously important,” she says. “It became a symbol of my studio, and it has been with me ever since.”

Top: Lipsky in her studio with a painting titled Pagoda. (Joe Wilensky / Cornell University; all other images courtesy of Lipsky and James Fuentes Gallery, unless otherwise indicated)

Published February 17, 2026