Artist Statement
"I believe places have a perceptible soul, imbued by layer upon layer of cultural, physical and historical impact. These aspects of place converge with the more temporal elements of light, location and time to capture my imagination. I attempt to interpret this soul, the layering of elements that makes each place and moment unique, however unattainable and impossible to duplicate in art. Painting the landscape allows me to ground myself in a particular place and time. It is a moment of true connection with the mysterious spirit of light, and the unexplainable incarnation of “things”. To plant oneself in a location is to become like a plant itself, experiencing the passage of the sun, the warmth and cold, the dappling of light and its disappearance. As an artist, recording this, in the moment of its occurrence, you become a crucial part of the process. There is a certain comfort in that, that stopping of trying to understand what is not understandable, and a transition occurs to the pure experience of it, the participation in it. Then I begin to paint, to take it under my skin."

Biographical Information
Molly Lipsher grew up in West Haven, Connecticut and has lived in Ithaca, New York; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Manhattan. She attended Bard College, University of Connecticut, Cornell, and Harvard, where she earned a master’s degree in landscape architecture.

Molly has hitchhiked across North Africa, and lived for months on a beach in Marrakech, Morocco, and in Corfu, Greece. Her jobs have included working the counter in Kentucky Fried Chicken, selling magazine subscriptions, counting nematodes, studying the infection characteristics of measles, selecting the location for General Motors Saturn plant, designing playgrounds, managing construction, and providing real estate investment strategies for the country’s largest investment banks. She has been a professor at Pratt Institute, Marymount College and Touro College. She currently lives in Cardiff, California where she paints and writes award winning poetry. She shows her work in New York and California, and teaches landscape painting workshops for pastel.

Medium and Technique
“I use pastel, because I love the depth and vibrancy of the color, qualities I have not found in any other medium. The sticks I use are nearly pure pigment, with almost no binder or additives in them, so the color is intensely rich, and since pastel is essentially a compressed powder, when applied to a surface it appears to absorb light rather than reflecting it, giving it a luscious, velvety appearance that I find so seductive. Pastels accommodate both sketching and painting, allowing the variation in stroke and technique which can be seen in my works. They can be applied thickly, or in a sketchy, abstract manner, allowing me to respond to the mood of a specific scene or circumstance. Pastels allow for a fresh and spontaneous application, so relevant for outdoor painting. When conditions are shifting quickly, I can lay in large blocks of color with the sides of the sticks, allowing a fast and immediate responsiveness to the ever changing conditions of light and shadow. I often camp on location, to experience the transitional character of a place under different light conditions and different times of day, exploring the unique light, shapes, and colors, and the mood that can be expressed in their various manifestations.”