About Us:

We are a wife and husband collaboration of many different arts and upcycled, hand made, crafted things. I come up with (sometimes) fabulous ideas and my husband helps me bring them to life. I paint local landscapes and hand engrave glass. Together we take photos of the night sky. He makes all the frames, creates the bases for all the lamps, wires the lights and often expands on my ideas to complete our projects. We hope you enjoy what we have to show.

The Full Story

Mina Clark and Brian Cowan

I was born and raised in Chicago. After arriving in the Adirondacks in 2001, I continued to work as a waitress and bartender which has been my profession for the last 30+ years. Having no formal art education and very little free time didn’t stop me from pursuing creative endeavors. In 2014, I had the opportunity to try my hand at painting. Never having taken a lesson, no one was more surprised than I was to find I had a natural talent from the start. As with most things I do, my paintings got smaller and smaller. I have always preferred a miniature scale to a large one but am experimenting with larger sizes.

Since I paint from photos, we picked up a pretty nice camera years ago so I could play with editing and composition in my paintings. We chose the camera specifically knowing we could try nighttime photography at some point in the future. A worldwide pandemic was the perfect opportunity to learn more about long exposure and photography in general.

On our ‘covid vacation’ my mother sent me a rotary tool for Christmas and so I taught myself to engrave glass by hand. I have recently begun to delve into more intricate engraving with shading but also thoroughly enjoy keeping with the simple forms of nature and basic patterns.

Brian was raised in Chateaugay NY. He is a very talented woodworker and an excellent problem solver with a style that compliments my own. He won’t participate in the ‘about me’ part of this site because he truly believes if you’re good enough at what you do, you don’t have to talk about it, it’ll be apparent. So for him I’ll say his attention to detail and razor sharp precision in all things completely comes in handy trying to bring my (and his own) ideas to life. He frames my paintings, glass engravings and our photos beautifully, electrifies our lamps, does all of the woodworking, striving for an almost neurotic perfection in all projects. I wouldn’t want to try to do it without him.