About

Arnie Lipsey is a painter who uses portraiture, narrative, and psychoanalytical dream imagery to explore questions of identity, family history and second-generation trauma. Arnie’s acrylic canvases reference archival family photographs as a point of departure for this inquiry into the hidden psychological motivations and patterns that undergird family mythologies. The viewer is invited to witness the emotional specificity of someone else’s family, and then relate it to the mythologies of their own. Arnie’s paintings are suffused with magic realism, and are further influenced by storybook illustration, commercial advertising art, and a design sense borne of an award-winning career in animation. He has exhibited and won awards in juried exhibitions and group shows in Ontario and Florida.

The son of immigrants, Arnie was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, and graduated from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art and Design. He relocated to Toronto, where he had a decades-long career in animation for film and television. Working in classical animation (as director, animator, designer, and storyboard artist) using pencil and paper, he later made a successful transition to digital technologies. Arnie augmented his commercial work with independent filmmaking, making 2 award-winning short animated films that have been screened internationally. In 2017, he returned to his early artistic discipline, painting.