Marilyn Minter

Marilyn Minter was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and raised in Florida in an upper-middle-class household. As an undergraduate at the University of Florida, Minter took photographs of her mother that drew the attention of visiting instructor Diane Arbus.

Minter moved to New York City in 1976, after earning a master of fine arts degree at Syracuse University. She became involved in the nightclub scene in Manhattan of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She also taught in a Catholic boys' school. In 1985 she began working in art again.

Her photographs and works often include sexuality and erotic imagery. Her method of painting involves many coatings of translucent enamel paint on metal to produce a luminous, almost hallucinatory finish. Her photographs are all taken in order to create a painting, yet sometimes she uses the photograph as is, without converting it. She does not use a graphic-editing program on her images, nor does she crop them, but rather uses different aspects of the image to create the painting.

“ I think that whenever you make something that looks good, people want to underestimate it. They immediately want to dismiss it. If it looks really good, there’s an automatic rejection. But it doesn’t really matter, because I know that these paintings are going to look good in 20 or 30 or 50 years. So if people don’t get it now, they’re going to get it sooner or later. ” (Wikipedia)



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