Lucy Mink

Lucy Mink, based in Contocook, NH, creates enigmatic paintings that suggest works from the most intriguing parts of 20th Century Modernism while offering color-play, mark making, and compositions that are inventive and undoubtedly contemporary.

Nothing in Mink’s painting is quick to pin down. Falling somewhere in the liminal space between abstraction and representation, each piece provides moments of clarity set against beats of obscurity. A flowing landscape, intersects abruptly with an ambiguous geometric form. Shifting brushwork meets the hard edge of a color field. An interior space gently melts into ether and suddenly you’re floating in the curious waves of an undulating pattern. The pleasure of these works is in their inability to be simple, straightforward. A viewer best enters this work with an understanding that the rules of its logic are set from within and that the dogma that ruled paintings of past eras will double back against itself when applied here.

Borrowing from off-beat painters, Mink finds a kinship with artists that cut untrammeled territory. The work of Arthur Dove or Milton Avery are cousins with Mink’s unruly “landscapes.” Works push and pull, shifting our perspective to feel both close and far away at once. Some paintings feel as if they could be one square inch of a Marsden Hartley work stretched large to explore the patterns a paintbrush makes. Others pull back to create landscapes beyond landscapes, a depth of field nestling extravagant space into works of modest size.