Barbara Mink

Very glad to have gotten input from so many people yesterday on whether an artist should share older work or just new things. I took the overwhelming response to "retrospective"" to heart and added older work to the website at barbaramink.com. Feel better already! I think what prompted this introspection was my going back to fruit and flowers this year, which is where I started, but approaching it with the techniques I now use. Looser, translucent, not botanical illustration. Felt like a good time to look backwards as well as forwards.

I had the pleasure of visiting the Dia: Beacon museum in Beacon, NY a couple of weeks ago with daughter Emily. What a staggering experience; the luxury of the natural-lit, long galleries with minimal installation of minimalist works.  I must admit I had trouble initially with rooms of Robert Ryman's all-white paintings, but Em pointed out that he favored process over product; and while his gessoing or painting over linen was his process, the viewer's process was coming to the work with unfulfilled expectations, and being forced to deal with what does fill your mind, standing there. Interesting. The building was converted ten years ago from a Nabisco box printing factory. Do go if you can.

I saw the most remarkable show Sunday in Los Angeles: James Turrell's retrospective at LACMA. There has been a lot written about this, including a New York Times cover article the same day, but all I can write about is my own reaction. Entering St. Elmo's Breath I felt like I was walking into death. The room had no walls: the light was gray and suffused, with a shimmering white light at the end of the room. Figures disappeared into the light. I am, admittedly, emotionally vulnerable, thinking immediately of my mother and Dan, so I started weeping and couldn't stop. but what Turrell has done is truly visionary, a way to shake up our way of being in the world. Other installations open at the Guggenheimm in NYC next week. The Los Angeles show runs through April.

Arclight  50x70 Eutropia I Eutropia II Qin Yan New work, many pieces will be in upcoming show at Orazio Salati gallery in Binghamton which opens June 7 and runs through the end July. The ones with strange-sounding names are part of the body of work Vanished Kingdoms, Invisible Cities; I hope at some point to mount a show on that theme.

I've been painting nonstop lately, now that school is finished. I still find it hard without Dan's sharp comments, but Emily is stepping in, brilliant artist and critic that she is, and Jack is of course, both wonderfully supportive and willing to offer intuitive feedback.  The more I look back a the texts that inspired me to start this series, the more relevant to today they seem. For example, this quote from the introduction to Calvino's Invisible Citie s, describing Kublai Khan's realization that" ..we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing".  But that's a political view; for me,  I'm exploring vanished kingdoms of memories, invisible cities of our dreams.

Two new additions to my series "Vanished Kingdoms" "Tolosa" is on raw linen, "Andora" is on primed canvas. I'm drawing on names from Davies' Vanished Kingdoms and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, as well as Mieville's City & the City.  . Thanks to Jack for Calvino suggestion.

I have started painting again, after several months of inaction and the truly awful loss of my dear stepson and painting collaborator, Dan.  I keep looking at what I'm doing through his eyes; not easy, as those of you who paint know, there is no substitute for a constructive critic with a good eye and good taste. I'm working on a series inspired by reading Norman Davies' book Vanished Kingdoms , which has a lot of metaphorical resonance as well as historical interest. The idea of every-shifting boundaries, the shifting of power and hegemony and styles through the ages, really puts the minutiae of every day life in context. I go between more traditional interpretations of Chinese landscapes and fanciful constrctions.