Barbara Lubanski-Wenger started her artistic pursuits with oil painting and drawing classes at SUNY Geneseo, and design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Although her primary degrees were in anthropology, sociology and psychology, she has sought ways to be creative. Interested in cultures and groups, she brought her camera along to document two important communities in her life-the San Francisco Zen Center and CommunityGrows, a nonprofit she founded which cultivates healthy youth through growing gardens in low-income, diverse communities. Her photos have appeared in numerous books and national publications.
Simultaneously, for the past decade she has been studying photography and graphic design at City College of San Francisco. Her most recent work has been in watercolors, a challenging new medium.
Composition, light, design, and wabi-sabi are important elements in her thinking and seeing. Faces and people feature prominently in her work–reflecting humor, sadness, intrigue, mystery, and the indomitable spirit of a world tribe. She is forever fascinated by the extraordinary and the simple, and tries to capture a feeling, be it timeless or timely.
She’s working towards being spontaneous, experimental, exploratory, abstract, flowing and surprising.
