Libby Manchester Gilpatric
Art & Bio 2024
25 years of professional painting
Just five miles from the local steel-making industry in Youngstown, Ohio, five Manchester children played in the sandbox, up apple trees, in the corn rows or near their mother’s flowers. Vivid memories creep into Gilpatric's work.
Wilson College, the University of Pennsylvania, marriage, two sons, living in New York City, Summit NJ, and most recently Portsmouth, RI, have been feeding her art experience. Included were interesting classes and frequent visits to the New York Museums, the Newport Art Museum and three intense years at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts. New England coastal living and sailing the sea from island to island along the New England coast into Nova Scotia formed a new reality and challenges for marine and rural scenes for one who had only painted with watercolor before arriving in Rhode Island.
Juried into local, regional and national shows, Gilpatric’s oil paintings won awards: from Best in Show to Honorable Mention, recently adding one for a watercolor. More recognition came with A Biker painting published on the cover of Rhode Island Health Magazine. Twelve paintings were chosen and six appeared in Richard Gere’s film Hachi (2009). Two oil paintings of local scenes were placed in Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s Providence offices. Five paintings appeared in the Mayor’s office at Providence City Hall, for about five months. Four months during Spring 2017, seven paintings hanging above escalators and in the Green Space Gallery were placed to entertain travelers at TF Greene Airport as they went from train to plane or the reverse.
Since 2020, Gilpatric has become a visual songsmith with new abstract explorations inspired by the jazz she listens to while painting. Rhythm, harmony, paint, marks and a multitude of palette combinations cause emotional musical responses and even intense concentration. Memories of visiting these coastal communities may be expressed through patterns and chord-like color harmonies with many of her depictions of the natural world’s rhythms, melodic movements and vibrations depicting elements of earth, sky and sea, or shapes and planes geometric or organic. Using more tools for mark-making than the usual brushes to elicit new emotional responses, a viewer may see traces of an earlier career as a professional calligrapher, while still other artistic endeavors show through multiple layers of paint applications learned in training with expressive and experimental techniques of faux painting surface finishes learned in New York City - homogenizing a lifetime of artistic expressions using a variety of painting mediums. Painting is Gilpatric's life, on-going and ever changing.
See Libby Manchester Gilpatric’s works on Facebook and Instagram, plus online galleries, local shows and curations. Better yet, view in person works-in-progress or displayed on the walls at Gilpatric Studio in Portsmouth by invitation - if you join her email list. The email recipients will be privvy to new works or private reviews of available past work. See the directive below and on every page here. But also feel free to send a direct text via social media Messenger if you follow her posts. oE-mail her a request to schedule an appointment, or sign up with your e-mail address to be invited with a small group.)
Website: https://www.libbymgilpatric.com · E-mail: [email protected] (a private way for you to reach her)
Social: Libby Manchester Gilpatric on multiple Facebook pages and @libbygilpatricart on Instagram (not as private)