Barbara Mink was born in Buffalo, New York. Mink studied with Stan Taft, Bill Benson, and the late Bente King and Thomas Buechner. She is a member of the Ithaca Art Trail, the Buffalo Society of Artists, and Western NY Artists Group, and is represented by Sadoff Art Advisory in NYC and Velvenoir, Austria for European sales.

Barbara describes her work:

“I grew up with art all around me. My father was an abstract painter, and Buffalo featured a wonderful modern art gallery and a lively arts scene. I started painting relatively late, and went through as many styles, subjects, and media as I could, before coming happily to rest in a world of the spare, the muted, and the geometric. Now I am back to color and texture, but incorporating some of the architectonic lines I love. Even when tending toward the monochromatic, color is always an important part of my work: it is energy, emotion, life. Whatever I devise in terms of hue, saturation, and vibrancy must be met with a restraining force or structure, and I increasingly explore processes that set different qualities of color, pigment, and texture against each other.”

Leslie Ford is an abstract painter whose practice embraces printmaking and photography. Her work is inspired by her meditations on literature; current events, music lyrics and popular culture seem through the lens of simple engagement of process. She seeks to provide clarity or identify hidden meaning between two or more conceptual ideas by combining studio practices with processes of the mind to express her metaphors of ephemeral ideas. She holds a BFA in Design from Carnegie-Mellon University and completed a summer residency in Painting and Mixed Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Based in New York, Leslie is an Art File Member of the Painting Center of New York City and an Artist Associate Member of the Ink Shop, Ithaca, NY.

Leslie Ford / Artist’s Statement:

“Uncertainty” should I stay or should I go?

My painting practice is about layers of understanding and vision. I have a strong interest in mirage as an experience. Sensory distortions, perceptions and deceptions are present in all my work. What we see or think we see may or may not be physically present but could still be an experience.

I'm interested in reciprocal play that manifests in subtle ways. The interacting colors and shapes of my prints flow into each other coordinating the momentary space between dreaming and being fully conscious. I use papers, heat and paint to explore similar landscapes in an immediate way. These works are spontaneous and uncontrolled much like the fleeting memory of yesterday’s thoughts. 

My photography practice exists to inform my painting and printmaking practices.