Ish Lipman was born in San Francisco and raised in Los Angeles. He graduated from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2018 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing in 2019. Currently he is an MFA candidate in the painting program at the Art Institute of Chicago.
My work is an attempt to find moments of stillness amidst constant change. Switching from an internal world of thought and imagination to an external world of physical occurrences. These constant transformations blur together, until both internal and external perceptions loose any semblance of solid truth. In this state the most banal settings become distorted, uncanny and imbued with melancholy. Yet below the initial discomfort is the hint of a silence that cannot be disturbed or rationally comprehended. The paintings that emerge from these investigations have a similar existence to those moments between sleeping and waking, where the world is colored with the aftertaste of a vivid dream. Painting allows me to linger in these moments of longing, moments that provide a glimpse of freedom, the possibility of an existence that is not defined by sharp lines but instead by constant and gentle change.