Halpern acquired the basis of painting in the studios of Yehezkel Streichman and Avigdor Stematsky, but taught at the Avni Art Institute largely by virtue of his natural talent. His watercolors convey the artist's affinity to the landscape in a style practiced by several local aquarellists at the time. Halpern, who did not subscribe to the abstract dictum of New Horizons, aligned himself with a group of artists who favored a distinctly regional art. His work forged a synthesis between representations of the local landscape, bathed in light, and abstraction, thus, in his renderings of the bare and arid Negev and Arava scenery, the brightness of the sun dissolves the objects, fusing them with the abstract desert planes. In the views of Jerusalem and Safed, in contrast, the figurative elements dominate: stone buildings, cliffs, and typical mountain vegetation. In Halpern's oils the paint is layered in heavy impasto, creating a kind of three-dimensional relief. In the 1970s, his quest to render the local light made him mix oil with scintillating marble dust. The paint layers gradually became less viscous, but the weight of the paint itself increased and the sense of plastic density was retained.
