David Lippert ’90 has removed belly fat from Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears.
Digitally, that is.
“You’d be surprised how actors really look,” Lippert said. “I’ve done tattoo removal, and if there’s a profile shot with tummy sticking out, it’s edited out. Nothing is real.”
The Hillsdale grad and psychology major has worked in film, fine art, and commercial design since leaving Hillsdale. This weekend, his first art exhibit ever, “Design Beyond Boundaries,” opens in the Sage Center for the Arts’ Daughtrey Gallery. The exhibit will emphasize the entrepreneurial nature of Lippert’s career, debunking the myth that art students can’t go onto successful careers, especially in business.
“It was a natural for us to celebrate how he has utilized the broad experiences of his Hillsdale liberal arts background to propel success in the business sphere,” Professor of Art Sam Knecht said.
Lippert’s exhibit will highlight different categories of his work. There will be traditional oil paintings, which Lippert is borrowing on loan from private owners, and which contain a mix between realism and expressionism. Photography will be included, along with illustrations, many of which are for children’s books.
“In painting he thought big, doing large abstract canvasses full of dynamic sweep and vibrant color,” Knecht said in an email. “For Dave, confronting a big canvas on his easel was like a general guiding a campaign as well as the troops slogging it out on the battlefield. While taking pictures he dared to do the unconventional, to look at a subject in a fresh, attention-grabbing way. The department still has a number of his undergraduate photos in copies in our archives.”
“Design Beyond Boundaries” will display much of Lippert’s work in product development.
“A prominent piece of the exhibit is a documentary,” Lippert said. “It’s a piece on how you design a product from concept to delivery. I shot it for five days in Vietnam. A lot of the footage was from a factory, doing sampling with the owners and people there, and covering all the other aspects.”
Lippert’s start in film began right out of college, where he graduated as a psychology major with many art credits. He worked on shows like “The Wonder Years,” “Jim Henson’s Dinosaurs,” and “Roseanne,” where he met his wife. He also worked in pre-production for the 1995 hit “The Shawshank Redemption.”
“I segued into visual effects,” Lippert said. “At that time, computers were not desktops. CGI was just becoming popular, and commercials were the first to embrace it. I worked for a boutique in post-production. Now with Adobe and desktop computers you can do a lot with that. The business has changed.”
Lippert and his wife realized they didn’t want to raise their family in Los Angeles, so they moved back to Lippert’s home state, Michigan, where Lippert took over his family’s business of marketing and sales.
“It was quite an adjustment period, culturally,” he said.
Lippert innovated and improved the company, including adding in-house photography to its repertoire. Four years ago, Lippert moved all production to Vietnam.
“I would say that my experience at Hillsdale and the entertainment industry prepared me for the product development work I’m currently involved in,” Lippert said.
According to Lippert’s website, davidlippert.com, Lippert has done a wide range of promotional work, and specialized in bag design for those who work in their vehicles. While Lippert still continues with personal art, that is not his primary source of income.
“Product development is driven by commercial needs, not out of artistic inspiration. The customer drives me,” he said.
Junior Meg Prom is very excited about Lippert’s exhibit. She, like Lippert before her, is studying psychology and art.
“I want to end up doing graphic design of some sort, be it editorial design, illustrative design, commercial design, or marketing design,” she said. “It’s cool to see he’s branched out and been creative in a lot of different ways. It gives me hope for my future.”
Lippert endorses real-life experiences as the best form of education.
“You can’t get everything from a book; you have to experience life, have adventure, take risks,” he said. “I’ve had so many failures in my life, but all you remember are the successes.”
