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| This was a sign that hung on my father's gallery at Oldtown USA in Buffalo, 1974-75 |
Some of my best
childhood memories include “helping” my father paint huge abstracts in our
basement on Parkside in Buffalo, accompanying him to Niagara Falls to sketch,
or setting up for outdoor art festivals. I didn’t start painting myself until
much later, but those formative experiences made me feel that making things was
part of life- and that the process was as important as the end result.
A member of
the Buffalo Society of Artists and Western New York Artists Group, my father
Irving Mink was also a research scientist at Roswell Park Memorial Institute
and educator who painted and exhibited locally, nationally and internationally
for 50 years. He won many awards, had one-man shows in Toronto, New York City,
Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo, and his works are represented in over 800
private collections.
I remember
that for him, flexibility was the key. When he was doing Pollack-like pours and
drips on huge canvases on the floor, I accidentally knocked over a box of
birdseed onto the canvas- it was promptly incorporated into the paintings.
While sketching outdoors mist from Niagara Falls got his paper wet- the
resultant bleed just added to the watery feel.
His trajectory
was an interesting one- from very large abstract landscapes, to isolated
figures in pencil, to pen and ink drawings and small acrylics, He used a
combination of expressive line and negative space to give an ambiguous
emotional tone to the work. They can be seen as either isolated figures or figures
in sharp focus. He once wrote: “My
goals are simple; to create beauty, something that is good to look at. Old
people, lonely people, are often my subjects; I paint what I feel, influenced
only by vague memories, a fleeting emotional fancy. This is my piece of
history, my footprints in the sands of time.“
My artistic
arc has been almost the reverse- I started with botanical drawing, large
watercolor flowers, then fruit, fish, figures and landscapes until I moved to
large-scale abstract oils and acrylics. The space in which I now work has a
more architectural feel, an interplay of color, line and texture. Paintings which were vigorously chromatic and heavily layered
have evolved in the direction of the spare, the muted, and the geometric. I
believe that scale has as much to do with the power of the image to enter the
imagination, as it does physical dimensions.
I started
painting in 1999 and it has been part of my life through careers in politics,
university teaching, and founding an annual festival of science and art. As an
active member of the Ithaca Art Trail, State of the Art Gallery and the Buffalo
Society of Artists, I’ve had the good fortune to show and sell in and beyond New
York State.
My father and
I have shown together three times - in 1999 at the Kenan Center in Lockport
where my outsized botanicals meshed with his pen and ink figurative drawings,
at the Jewish Center of Buffalo, and in 2005 at State of the Art Gallery in
Ithaca, with photography by my brother Symon and pottery masks by my
sister-in-law Ronna
I'm going to be showing his work with mine twice, as a way to honor his memory and abilities- and just to keep him more present a bit longer. In August I'll split the Mink Gallery into two, and hang a mixture of his oils, acrylics and pencil drawings with mine. Some of his prints will be available for sale, but most of the work will be part of our family's collection.
Then this September
I’ll be bringing a selection of his Judaica from the 1980’s, inspired
by a trip he made to Israel with my mother in 1971, to the Echo Art Fair in Buffalo. I had
suggested to him that we should apply to the Echo Art Fair earlier this year together,
in part as a way to look forward, after a year of mourning my mother and his
own declining health. He died two weeks
before we were notified that we got into the show. I can’t think of a more
wonderful way to honor his work and to celebrate his life than having this
opportunity to share a booth again.
The fourth annual Echo Art Fair will be
held September 6 and 7, at the downtown Central Library in Buffalo NY.
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