I’ve been making art most of my life, but after retiring from a career in nursing I decided to pursue my passion for painting and writing full time.

~~ Barbara Lipkin

My Paintings

I have taken many courses and workshops over the years in painting, drawing, sculpture, print-making and art history, so I can’t claim to be self-taught, but in a sense, I think all artists are self-taught. You can learn the techniques and materials, but they are only tools to let you make your vision appear on canvas. However, I love to teach others so that they, too, can begin making art.

I love to play with paint, to create interesting, beautiful and often whimsical art by combining different shapes, colors, textures and designs. My work has evolved considerably in the years I’ve been creating paintings. These days, the paintings often have little, if anything, to do with representing anything real and everything with seeing where my experimentation can take me.

I love meeting people at art fairs and book readings, which have unfortunately been curtailed during the pandemic, but never fear–I’ll be out there again. In the meantime, I try to keep my website updated with my latest work, which doesn’t stop, Covid-19 notwithstanding.

My Novels

All forms of art–painting, music, writing, sculpture–are connected to each other, and my latest artistic expressions include four recently published mystery novels having to do with art, history, travel and even a little romance: Painting Lessons: a Bella Sarver Mystery, Brush With Death: a Bella Sarver Mystery, and Paint a Murder: a Bella Sarver Mystery, and Death on the Danube: a Bella Sarver Mystery.

All artist Bella Sarver really wants to do is paint and teach and enjoy her post-retirement career, but somehow she and her friends keep finding themselves in the midst of murder. Thanks to her knowledge of art, Bella manages to point the way to ‘whodunnit.’My mystery novels offer an insider view of the art world that most ordinary artists live and work in.

A Wonderful Good Morning is a science fiction mystery with apocalyptic overtones.

Meantime his friends back in Chicago, artists Natalie and Steve among them, are wondering what happened to him. Maybe, but it will take a bit of detective work to find out.

Tim Pfeiffer is a young meteorologist from Chicago who feels like a fish out of water while on a Rhine River cruise populated almost exclusively by the over-70 set. He is beginning to feel pretty comfortable though, sort of like traveling with his grandparents, when things become really strange. He keeps having this sense of déjà vu, as if he’d experienced these particular destinations only yesterday. Maybe he really did.

Riva’s Journey: a Memoir is the book my grandmother might have written if she’d had the chance. It’s the story of a Jewish woman born in the Russian Pale of Settlement, an area into which nearly all the Jews living in the Russian Empire were restricted, in the late 19th century. It was a tumultuous time in history, especially for the Jews who were caught up, not only in the continuous wars and revolutions, but additionally, in the unrelenting anti-Semitism that made their lives difficult and precarious. It’s the story of a woman who left that life and immigrated to a new and better life in America. It’s the story of every immigrant, past and present, who uprooted themselves and journey into the unknown, in the hope of a better life for their children.

All 6 books are available on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle versions.

AMAZON