Pat Lipsky has been exhibiting her carefully hued works since the 70’s. A group of recent paintings at Elizabeth Harris Gallery offers compositions of abutted rectangles and canvases of mixed media, alkyd, oil, acrylic and egg tempera, each offering a study of a different range of color.

The work depicted below, Girls in Yellow Dresses Dancing (2000), is, as the title suggests and is absolutely not apparent in the black and white reproduction, a sophisticated harmony of rich yellows with the darker values veering into orange reds and purple blues. Peaking through at rectangles’ edges is underpainting the color of a surface prepared for gold leaf.

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“Girls” aren’t readily apparent but human presence is in the not quite straight lines delineating the rectangles and the drips of paint dripping up and down, which show that the paintings have been painted with a lively hand and, as well, turned top to bottom and bottom to top while in production. With all the sophisticated nuance of these works, being given these dripped clues of the activity of process seems almost too much information.