Painter Mel Leipzig Keeping Busy With Lecture, Film, Four Exhibits

Realist painter and professor of art at Mercer County Community College (MCCC) Mel Leipzig, 75, has no intention of slowing down. He’s been featured on New Jersey Network, his work is or will be on exhibit at four area galleries, and on Tuesday, February 22, he will be presenting a slide lecture on the societal impact of modern and post-modern art in “Collage and Its Influence.”

The free public lecture, which kicks off Mercer’s Distinguished Lecture Series for the spring 2011 semester, will take place at noon in MCCC’s Communications Building, Room 110, on the West Windsor campus, 1200 Old Trenton Road. Mr. Leipzig will discuss the technique of collage, its early masters, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and its influence on the works of cubist Juan Gris, DADA and surrealists Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, George Grosz and Hannah Hoch, African-American artist Romare Bearden, and pop artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Tom Wesselman — all to be featured in the presentation.

Mr. Leipzig’s life and career was highlighted in the recent documentary, Mel Leipzig: Everything is Paintable, on New Jersey Network’s State of the Arts. Although the exhibit at the Art Gallery at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (“Mel Leipzig: Paintings – Michael Graves, Teachers, and Others”) will close in two days, his work will be featured in “Mel Leipzig: Life” at the Noyes Museum of Art at Stockton College, through May 29, while “Mel Leipzig: Semi-Retrospective” will run at the Rider University Art Gallery from March 10 to April 17, and “The Influence of a Teacher: Mel Leipzig and Proteges” will open March 6 and continue through April 29 at the West Windsor Arts Council. There will be an opening reception March 19, 4:30 to 7 p.m., and a talk, “The Influence of Monet, Cezanne and Manet,” on March 27, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Visit www.westwindsorarts.org for location and free event parking details.

The art critic Burton Wasserman has called Leipzig “New Jersey’s greatest living painter” and another reviewer suggests that a hundred years from now, someone searching for a truthful depiction of middle-class suburban life in America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries would do well to study the paintings of Mel Leipzig. The people in his paintings are teachers, architects and artists; tattooed teenagers in a bedroom or young adults sneaking out by moonlight to experience a world beyond their suburban domicile; parents and their children poised over the remains of dinner, or getting ready to begin the day in the mirrored reflection of a tiled bathroom; families in their backyards and at the beach; robed clergy posing in their places of worship. The painter’s refusal to work from photographs (because it “would dilute the intensity of feeling that I am seeking”) heads out regularly in his white van, crisscrossing the New Jersey midlands to keep his in situ painting appointments. He arrives with everything he needs, including a tarp, paper towels, paint stand and even the water to clean his brushes. Wearing a shirt and tie, he steps into his paint-spattered coveralls and gets down to his business.

A longtime Trenton resident, Leipzig has exhibited his artwork in numerous one-man and group gallery shows, including the New Jersey State Museum, the Pearlman Gallery at Drexel University and the Villanova University Art Gallery and his works are in the collections of such places as the White House in Washington, D.C., The Whitney Museum, the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven, Conn. and the New Jersey State Museum and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City. His numerous honors include a Fulbright Traveling Fellowship and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. He joined the faculty of MCCC in 1968.

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