Libby Manchester Gilpatric

Just five miles south of the local steel mills in Youngstown, Ohio, skies etched with rust-colored smog, five Manchester children played in a yard of grass and flowers, climbed apple trees and hid among rows of corn. Number four of the five, vivid memories creep into Gilpatric’s work.

During the years in New York and New Jersey, Gilpatric fulfilled her art craving through sideline art careers as calligrapher, faux-finish-painter and watercolor painter. Classes at Newport Art Museum and Rhode Island School of Design led her to pursue foundational art training at Lyme Academy of Fine Arts where she studied painting in American Contemporary Realism.

Now living nearly thirty years in Rhode Island, Gilpatric’s art has evolved. Enthralled with calligraphy and music, especially jazz, she became a Visual Songsmith while exploring abstraction with rhythmic mark-making, color and pattern in oil, acrylic and watercolor. Art is her life story, with painting her primary focus for over 60 years. Recent paintings reveal the application of paint as if it were some kind of clay, shaping geological forms adding architectural structure to compositions. Gilpatric recalls early dreams of studying architecture spending hours of the early years in the sandbox in her Ohio backyard developing habits of piling up sand patting into shapely forms. Early beach days at Lake Erie were the training ground where a child’s hand-building with sand and flat rocks seized her attention, re-emerging seven decades later. Current paintings created at Acadia National Park testify to a style popular with visitors to Bar Harbor on Mt. Desert Island, Maine.

Juried into local and national shows Gilpatric’s works won recognition at Cape Cod Art Association, Newport Art Museum, Mystic Art Museum, The Providence Art Club, the Art League of Rhode Island, two Best in Show oil paintings at Wickford Art Association, art exhibits on all sides of Narragansett Bay, oil, abstract and watercolor awards, at The Little Compton Summer Art Show and the Westport Art Group shows. A Biker painting appeared on the cover of Rhode Island Health, six oil paintings on the set of Richard Gere’s movie, Hachi, filmed-in-Bristol, RI. Oil paintings were hung in Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s offices. Seven works (two 36x48”) were displayed at TFGreen Airport Gallery. A seascape was published in ArtScope Winter, 2015, and the Award of Distinction in Oil Painting for, Pennsylvania Horse Farm was published in Art&Color (digital publication), Winter 2023.

Libby Manchester Gilpatric is pleased to be represented by Argosy Gallery in Bar Harbor, Maine. Her art has been shown as Exhibiting Artist Member (since about 2007) with the Connecticut Academy of Fine Art at the Mystic Museum of Art and now on CAFA’s website. Works may show up on Facebook/Libby Manchester Gilpatric, Instagram/@libbygilpatricart, the online gallery DailyPaintWorks.com/Mary Elizabeth (Libby) Gilpatric, the Google blog Libby’s New Painting Today <libbygilpatric.blogspot.com> and in local shows and curations, at portsmoutharts.org as well as at Gilpatric Studio in Portsmouth, RI.

Please join her email list to see new work and be invited to visit her studio for invitational events.
eMail: libbygilpatric@gmail.com Text to visit: 401 440 3974