Barbara Mink on Clubhouse

Bio

I was born in Buffalo, New York, started painting in 1998, and studied with Stan Taft, Bill Benson, and the late Bente King and Thomas Buechner. My trajectory to painting is not a direct line. I moved to Ithaca, New York in 1976 where I pursued a PhD in Comparative Literature, was a freelance actor in television and radio commercials, News Director of WHCU radio station, and received an MA degree in History from Cornell University in 1986. In 1989 I was elected to the Tompkins County Legislature and served for 12 years. In 2001 I founded the Light in Winter Festival of Science and Art. I have taught oral and written communication for MBA’s at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management since 1986.

But I grew up with art all around me. My father was an abstract expressionist painter, (as well as a cancer researcher, clearly a template for doing many things at once) and Buffalo featured a wonderful modern art gallery as well as a lively arts scene. I started painting relatively late, and went through as many styles, subjects, and media as I could, just to prove to myself that I could render. I have now come happily to rest in a world of the spare, the muted, and the geometric, going back and forth playing with color and texture, but still incorporating some of the architectonic lines I love.

I am an active member of the Greater Ithaca Art Trail, as well as the Buffalo Society of Artists and the Western New York Artists Group, with representation by Art Matters Consultants in Washington, DC, Velvenoir Austira for European sales, and Indigo Art Consultants, London England. My work can be found in collections in throughout the United States and Europe.