About

While perhaps best known for his photography, Roger Minick is also a painter. The story of how he became a painter began unexpectedly in 1984 when, at the age of 40, he became a graduate student in the Art Department at the University of California at Davis. Though he was there as a photography major, it was the non-photography staff at Davis, including Robert Arneson, Squeak Carnwath, and Wayne Thiebaud, that inspired Minick to try his hand at painting.

What Minick found so appealing about painting was the way its chaotic, messy, hands-on aspect offered a welcome contrast to photography’s unforgiving demands for precision. Also, when digital took the photography world by storm in the mid-nineties, he saw painting as the ultimate analogue alternative. But it was during COVID that Minick’s painting finally came into its own – more than photography, it was the perfect shelter-in-place activity.

This website makes Minick's secret Walter Mitty life of painting public for the first time. Not surprisingly, many of the same themes associated with his photography are also found in his painting: a love of light, mystery, color, landscape, portraiture, abstraction, mixed media, experimentation, and always the sheer joy of creation for creation’s sake.

                 Self Portrait, 2024