29 Facts About Robert Kipniss

Robert Kipniss was born on Brooklyn, New York, February 1,1931 and is an American painter and printmaker.

Robert Kipniss's works have been described as conveying solitude and inward experience.

Robert Kipniss often uses the subject matter of a painting in a lithograph or mezzotint, sometimes with variations.

Robert Kipniss married his second wife, Laurie Lisle, a writer, in 1994.

Robert Kipniss has four children from his first marriage, in 1954, to Jean Prutton.

Robert Kipniss was born in 1931 in Brooklyn, New York, to Simeon and Stella Kipniss, both of whom worked in Manhattan.

At age sixteen, Robert Kipniss attended New York's Arts Students League on Saturdays.

Robert Kipniss began college in 1948, attending Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio, for two years before transferring to the University of Iowa, Iowa City, in 1950.

Robert Kipniss was drafted into the US Army in 1956 and assigned to the Instructional Aids Division of the Quartermaster Corps at Fort Lee, Virginia, where his drawing skills were put to use in making training aids.

Robert Kipniss continued what had become a routine, painting by day and working at the Manhattan General Post Office during the evenings; by 1964, he was able to earn his living creating paintings.

Since 1965 Robert Kipniss has had more than twenty-two museum and other institutional one-man exhibitions across the United States and abroad.

Robert Kipniss's work is held by more than eighty-eight museums and other institutions.

Robert Kipniss himself has indicated various locations as important sources of inspiration, especially on his scenes with houses.

Robert Kipniss returned over the next twenty years to continue sketching.

Robert Kipniss returned the next year to do sketches that became the basis of works in other mediums.

Robert Kipniss composes his forms and spaces separately, working on each alternately after the paint has dried.

From 1968 to 1994, Robert Kipniss created lithographs that followed the style and content of his paintings, whether generally or specifically.

Robert Kipniss worked from 1969 with master printer Burr Miller and then with Steve and Terry, his sons.

In 1980 Robert Kipniss began to draw on aluminum to make all of his lithographs, and by 1986 he was achieving an increased subtlety in the use of color with a light palette including "greens, blues, pinks, browns, and grays," as a critic noted that year.

Robert Kipniss used six plates, with black, red, yellow, blue, green, or orange, for successive applications of color in the lithograph Through Bedroom Curtains, a scene depicted in a 1981 painting.

Robert Kipniss had begun painting interiors in his early work of the 1950s, and they appear about equally in his mature paintings and lithographs, and less so in his mezzotints.

Robert Kipniss had his first solo mezzotint show in New York in 1992.

Robert Kipniss showed mezzotints in 1995 at his first solo print show in England, and that year they comprised his first show of prints in Germany.

Robert Kipniss's preference has been for mechanically roughened plates because of their greater uniformity.

Over time, Robert Kipniss sought "narrower ranges of middle tones" while still bringing out the richness and resonance of darks characteristic of mezzotints.

Robert Kipniss has worked with master printer Anthony Kirk from 2003 to the present, first when Kirk was associated with the Connecticut Center for Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut, and then at Kirk's own studio in North Salem, New York.

The trees in Robert Kipniss's mezzotints have an especially strong purity of form when only their trunks are depicted.

Kipniss's memoir, Robert Kipniss: A Working Artist's Life, describes his artistic techniques and aspects of his career and personal life.

Robert Kipniss illustrated Poems by Emily Dickinson with twenty-six drawings.