September 3–October 3, 2007
Reception:  Thursday, September 20, 5:30–7 pm
Goodall Gallery
Spears Music/Art Center
 
 
The Columbia College Department of Art will open its 2007-2008 gallery schedule with a tribute exhibition featuring South Carolina artist Guy Lipscomb, accompanied by three generations of family artists:  Adeline Lipscomb, mother; Libba Tracy, daughter; and Elizabeth Foster, granddaughter of Guy Lipscomb entitled Guy Lipscomb and Family: Four Generations opening September 3 and running through October 3.
 
At the age of 90, Guy F. Lipscomb Jr. is regarded as a modern Renaissance man.  His life’s work has encompassed the sciences, arts, athletics, economics, education, and philanthropy.  He has devoted a large part of his recent years to the visual arts, becoming a prolific professional artist, as well as an arts advocate. 
 
Lipscomb received his degree in chemistry from the University of South Carolina, and pursued science, business, and athletics during his career.  Later in life he explored his artistic talent. Beginning with watercolor, he painted a range of local subject matter, mostly in the realistic style for which he became well-known.  Midway through his career, in the late eighties, he moved from realism to the semi-abstract to total abstraction, believing that “abstract art is a form of visual poetry, even visual music.”  With the transition came the exploration of more media and techniques, incorporating acrylics and mixed media into his work. This exhibit features some earlier realistic paintings but primarily features later, more abstract works.
 
Lipscomb has received accolades in the visual arts.  His work has been featured in over 40 solo exhibitions and was inducted into the American Watercolor Society. He also is co-founder of the South Carolina Watercolor Society and the Springmaid Workshops in Myrtle Beach.  He is the recipient of the Order of the Palmetto and the Elizabeth O’Neil Verner Award and is author of Watercolor: Go with the Flow published by Watson-Guptill of New York in 1993.
 
Lipscomb discovered the fine arts through the influence of his mother, Adeline Lipscomb, who began practicing art as effective and pleasurable therapy during a period of childhood illness. She took art lessons into adulthood and gathered works with other local women to present art shows in downtown Columbia.  The exhibit will feature a handful of Adeline’s work dated in the mid to late 1920s reflecting a range of media including pastel, charcoal, and gouache with the figure, portrait, still life and decorative arts as subject matter.
 
This exhibition also will feature works by Libba Tracy. Tracy, the youngest of four daughters to Guy and Margaret Lipscomb, has pursued a professional arts career in graphic illustration and design and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Georgia. Working primarily in watercolor, Tracy went on to become a painter and illustrator for children’s books and advertising.  Tracy’s first illustrated children’s book, This House is Made of Mud, written by Ken Buchanan, was featured on PBS’s Reading Rainbow program, and received accolades from the Arizona Library Association. She currently resides in Asheville, North Carolina. 
 
The youngest generation in the Lipscomb family is represented by the works of Elizabeth Foster. Foster received her undergraduate degree in studio art and art history from the University of Virginia and studied art education at the University of South Carolina on the graduate level.  Foster’s current work explores the use of birds as symbolic metaphors expressing such concepts as freedom, hope and spirit. In conjunction with her visual art pursuits, Foster also actively pursues a career as a professional singer and recording artist.  She recently began to show her works at the Bennett Gallery, All About Art Gallery, and The Nest gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is based.

 
Photos courtesy of the artists

Guy Lipscomb
"Willie Sunshine"
watercolor on paper
1980


Guy Lipscomb
"Many Angles"
acrylic on paper
2005


Adeline Lipscomb
Untitled
charcoal and gouache on paper
circa 1926-1929


Libba Tracy
"Mud Babies"
watercolor on paper
1991


Elizabeth Foster
"The Gift"
acrylic on canvas
2007