Eric Rippert (1963-)
Twilight Campfighter, 2017
Materials: Mixed media (acrylic, gesso, charcoal, oil pastels, paint markers and graphite) on canvas 50" x 40”.
Location at Summa Health: Dr. Gary B. and Pamela S. Williams Tower on the Akron Campus (141 N. Forge St.), blue neighborhood, sixth floor, outside family lounge overlooking downtown Akron.
About the art and artist
The colorful, layered forms of this painting are mostly abstract, defying identification, but some suggest familiar objects around us or in the sky, perhaps inspired by the title the artist has chosen for this work. Eric Rippert uses a range of materials both traditional (graphite, gesso, pastels) and contemporary (acrylic paint, paint markers), each capable of making certain kinds of marks that move the beholder’s attention around the canvas. Primary colors — blue, red, yellow — dominate, and the paint markers and graphite are exploited for the linear patterns and forms they create on the surface. This is a painting/drawing that is also about the process of painting and drawing.
But Rippert says that his work is also about intuition, sensed in free gestures recorded in the light-hearted forms, and about individual and collective memory, understood more as sensation than as explicit statement. The beholder should not worry about what the work means so much as how it feels.
The artist earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Master of Fine Arts from the Vermont College of Fine Art. He moved to Ohio after years of work as a commercial photographer in New York and has actively exhibited work in the U.S. as well as in Prague, the Czech Republic; and in Budapest. He has taught photography at a number of institutions in Northeast Ohio and maintains a studio in downtown Cleveland.
Where you can see more of this artist’s work:
Mixed media and other paintings by Rippert are held in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Cleveland Clinic, and the Dalad Collection at Worthington Yards. His website features recent works, and he maintains active accounts on Twitter and Instagram.