Barbara Mink

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.

Thank you Tom Schickel, Ithaca architect, for the roles of old drawings and elevations I plan to use in my next series. Not quite sure how yet, but I think I'll develop them side-by-side with "looking East" series, inspired by Chinese landscapes on raw canvas. For the architecture underlay I'll go back to primed canvas and a technique I learned with Carolyn Fellman a few years ago, incorporating paper underlay with painting on top. Excited.

I haven't been painting for the last few months, too busy with parental care in Buffalo and son health worry in Los Angeles, to say nothing of teaching. But I feel like trying to incorporate some architectural designs into a new piece. A number of years ago I used photos as part of a painting; want to see what overlaying a basis of diagrams with my minimalist approach feels like. 

 It's funny how inspiration works. When I visited the Helen Frankenthaler exhibit at Knoedler in NYC two years ago, I started on my experiment with raw canvas and linen, with the differentiating feature of line and a subdued palette. A few months ago I spent a long time in the Asian galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, and had a similar call to shift direction. I felt the urge to explore my long-standing admiration for Chinese and Japanese landscapes and calligraphy. Abstraction, restraint, and structure I think this is the beginning of a very pleasurable journey.