WhenI first wrote about contemporary American painter Jeremy Lipking back in 2006, I was struck in particular with his subtle and masterful understanding of value, and its relationship to color.

That impression has only been reinforced by the work I’ve seen from Lipking since then. His figures and faces, along with an occasional still life or landscape, carry forward the compositional strengths and restrained use of color often found in the late 19th century portrait masters like John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase, perhaps along with painters like Jules Bastien-Lepage.

I get the impression that in instances where other painters might work and rework to push their colors brighter, Lipking works and refines his compositions to restrain them into greater depths of harmony.

Lipking’s work will be on display in a solo show at Arcadia Contemporary in NY, that opens tomorrow, December 12, and runs to December 31, 2013.

While the show is running, a preview should be available here, but the page hasn’t turned over to the new show yet, and will be replaced with another show when this one is over. In the meanwhile there is a magazine style preview here. Even though the latter is in one of those dreadful page-flipping, jiggling-zoom magazine formats, it’s tolerable if you make it full screen. YOu can also see his Arcadia Gallery regular listing.

In addition to the updates on his blog, if you follow Lipking on Twitter or Instagram, you will occasionally be treated to images of works in progress.

Lipking is featured in the December 2013 issue of American Art Collector, for which his painting October Aspens (above, 6th down) was chosen for the cover.

Lipking conducts workshops, and has three instructional DVDs available on portrait and figure painting.

[Note: some images in the sites linked are NSFW]

“Selfies” were in the news again today, as the press evidently felt that the U.S. president taking one of himself and some other world leaders at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service was a newsworthy event (sigh).

Here are some more artists’ “selfies”, done with brush or graphite.

(Images above: Diego Rivera, George Tooker, Frits Thaulow, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Alphonse Mucha, Titian, Burton Silverman, Zinaida Serebriakova. [Thanks to Daniel van Benthuysen and Eric Kelly for their suggestions of Burton Silverman and Zinaida Serebriakova.])