Zelda Minkist, a native of Ithaca, New York and was apprenticed as a professional photographer’s assistant when she was still in the sixth grade. Her father, a professor of chemistry at Cornell University and an amateur photographer, had introduced her to the wonders of the camera early in life; Zelda took to the form readily and with enthusiasm. Thus, she became preoccupied early in life with matters of form and composition, and these concerns actively shaped her interests and her expressions.

The duotone, black and white world of photojournalism, however, could not compare in her mind and heart with the expression of colour, texture, and feeling that she found possible with the paintbrush. During high school, Zelda apprenticed with a number of artists in the New York area and eventually won a scholarship from the Savannah College of Art.

In Savannah, she earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art. Throughout this period, she pursued her studies of colour theory and painting, continuing to find in these endeavours greater creative stimulus and inspiration than she had know in her photographic work.

Following college, Zelda traveled to San Francisco and back to New York City before finally settling in Atlanta, where she began her artistic career in earnest. Not surprisingly, her early work incorporated photographs in it, which she coloured and painted over. But she soon broke free of the photographic medium altogether. In her latest series, “Quadras,” she experiments with techniques of painting to express textures that, in their turn, provoke or inspire a sequence of emotions in the viewer.

“My work is inspired photographically,” says Zelda, “but I take it beyond ordinary representation to create a harmonious blend of texture with composition.”