new york artist – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

The Artwork of Marylyn Dintenfass

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, Marylyn Dintenfass is an American painter, printmaker and sculptor known for the dynamic color palette of her oil paintings. She graduated from New York’s Queens College in 1965 with a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts. During her studies, Dintenfass worked with abstract expressionist painter John Ferren and muralist Barse Miller. She developed her own style of abstract expressionism and acquired an appreciation for the wide range of materials available.

Though mostly known for her paintings, Marylyn Dintenfass was first recognized for her sculptural mixed-media installations. Her use of ceramics, epoxies, pigments, wax, steel, lead and wood expanded the traditional definitions of ceramic work. The installation sculptures and architectural reliefs Dintenfass created were unique to her organic and structural personal style. For her work, she constructed a pictographic language that consisted of symbols and the fusion of curves and lines.

After a tour of museums in Paris, Rome and Amsterdam, Dintenfass traveled to Jerusalem in 1966. She studied etching and worked with Swiss painter Ruth Bamberger known for her textile design and fresco work. Through interactions with artists and intellectuals in the city, Dintenfass was given her first architectural commission; the design of Jerusalem’s first disco. She worked with a wide range of materials to fashion shapes, surfaces, textures, colors and light; these components became intrinsic parts of her developing artistic form .

Marylyn Dintenfass received large-scale installation commissions for the State of Connecticut’s Superior Courthouse; the New York Port Authority’s 42nd Street Bus Terminal; IBM’s headquarters in San Jose, Atlanta and Charlotte; and the Ben Gurion University in Israel, among others. In 2010, Dintenfass produced “Parallel Park”, a site-specific work for the exterior walls of the Lee County Justice Center’s parking garage in Ft. Myers, Florida. Each of her twenty-three images were enlarged tenfold to a size ten by seven meters through the utilization of digital software. These were then printed with archival ink on Kevlar fabric. Installed on all four facades of the garage, Dintenfass’s patterned images recalled the friezes and frescoes of Medieval as well as Italian Futurist artists.

Dintenfass’s paintings combine the intense gestural movements of Abstract Expressionism with the repetitive image technique from Pop Art. Central to her work are both the underlying grid reference and the adjustability of the modular sections in their relationships to others. These structural aspects lend stability to Dintenfass’s exuberantly colored and dramatic abstractions. Her abstract images often contain formations of circles or stripes that are formed over alternating layers of high gloss or matte textures.

Marylyn Dintenfass has shown her work in more than sixty national and international exhibitions including solo shows at the Queens Museum of Art, the Greenville County Museum of Art and the Mississippi Museum of Art, among others. Her work was included in the 2008 inaugural exhibition of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. Works by Dintenfass are housed in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

Dintenfass was awarded the Silver Medal at the First International Exhibition held in Mino, Japan, and the Ravenna Prize at the 45th Concorso Internazionale Della Ceramica D’Arte in Faenza, Italy. She was also a member of the faculty at New York City’s Parsons School of Design for ten years. Dintenfass was a visiting professor at Norway’s National College of Art and Design, the Brezel Academy of Art and Design in Israel, Canada’s Sheridan College, and New York City’s Hunter College.

Notes: Due to the large-scale format of work by Marylyn Dintenfass, the best way to view her art is through exhibitions. Her website, which includes exhibitions and publications as well as video interviews, is located at: https://www.marylyndintenfass.com

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, Marylyn Dintenfass at “Parallel Park”, 2011, Permanent Public Installation, Fort Meyers, Florida

Second Insert Image: Marylyn Dintenfass, “Token Thorn Prick”, “Drop Dead Gorgeous” Series, 2012, Oil on Canvas, 254 x 195.6 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, Installation of “Things Are Not What They Seem” Exhibition, Date Unknown

The Wood Engravings of Rockwell Kent

Born in Tarrytown, New York in June of 1882, Rockwell Kent was an American painter, graphic artist, writer and adventurer. A profoundly independent and thoughtful man, he acquired through his personal experience and skills a great respect for the dignity of labor and an appreciation of indigenous societies and cross-cultural encounters.

In his formative years, Rockwell Kent spent much of his life in the area of New York City. He attended the Horace Mann School, a private school and member of the Ivy Preparatory School League. In the fall of 1900, Kent studied composition and design at the Art Students League under painter, printmaker and curator Arthur Wesley Dow. He studied in the summers between 1900 and 1902 at one of the first plein air painting schools in America, Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art, under Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase.

In the fall of 1902, Kent entered the New York School of Art, founded by William Chase, where he studied under painter Robert Henri, one of the pioneers of the Ashcan School of American realism. He became an apprentice during the summer of 1903 to painter and naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer, one of the first to write about disruptive patterning to break up an object’s outlines, now known as Thayer’s Law. Kent earned his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from New York’s Columbia University which prepared him for occasional work as an architectural renderer and carpenter. While at Columbia, Kent developed a close friendship with Carl Zigrosser who later founded New York’s Weyhe Gallery and became Curator of Prints and Drawings at Philadelphia’s Museum of Art.

Rockwell Kent was a transcendentalist and mystic in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He found his inspiration in the austerity and primordial beauty of the wilderness. After his five-year residence on Monhegan Island in Maine, Kent lived for extended periods in Minnesota, Newfoundland, Alaska, Vermont, Tierra del Fuego, Ireland and Greenland. His landscapes and seascapes from these locales show a Symbolist viewpoint of the natural world. Kent published ten memoirs, complete with illustrations, of his travel years. The first of these volumes was the 1920 “Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska”, an account of his and his eldest son’s 1918 fall and winter exploration of Fox Island in Alaska’s Resurrection Bay.

Kent spent his early years as a painter in New Hampshire where he painted a series of landscapes and several views of Mount Monadnock, the most prominent mountain peak in southern New Hampshire. These works were first shown at the Society of American Artists in a 1904 New York City exhibition. In 1905, he began his five-year stay on Maine’s Monhegan Island; the series of paintings he produced during this period were shown in 1907 at New York’s Clausen Galleries to critical acclaim. The New Hampshire and the Monhegan paintings are the foundation for Kent’s reputation as an early American Modernist painter.

In the 1920s, Rockwell Kent began a career in illustration and contributed drawings for the covers of many leading magazines. Acknowledging Kent’s success with his 1920 illustrated “Wilderness”, publisher George Palmer Putnam and others incorporated Kent as ‘Rockwell Kent, Inc” to support him in his Vermont homestead while he completed his Alaskan paintings for a 1920 exhibition at New York’s Knoedler Galleries. Approached by publisher Thorne Donnelley for an illustrated version of “Two Years Before the Mast”, Kent suggested he instead illustrate an edition of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick; or, The Whale”. After researching whaling lore and visiting whaling museums, Kent created two-hundred and eighty illustrations for the 1930 three-volume set of “Moby Dick”, of which one thousand copies were printed by Donnelley’s Lakeside Press.

In 1927, Kent purchased Asgaard, an Adirondack farmstead in upstate New York, which became his residence and studio for the remainder of his life. In the summer of 1929, he traveled to Greenland on a painting expedition. Determined to paint and write, Kent spent two years between 1931 and 1935 living in a tiny fishing settlement above the Arctic Circle. His paintings from this period include some of the largest and most lauded of his career. Becoming more politically active as World War II drew near, Kent, on commission from the Treasury Department, painted two murals at the Federal Triangle Post Office in Washington DC that supported, in small letters of a Native Alaskan language, the decolonization of Puerto Rico.

In spite of his critical views on American foreign policy, Rockwell Kent remained America’s foremost draftsman of the sea. He produced a series of pen and ink maritime drawings for the American Export Lines during World War II. In 1946, Kent completed a second series for the Rahr Malting Company, a worldwide supplier to breweries, wineries and distilleries. These works were published in the 1946 “To Thee!: A Toast in Celebration of a Century of America 1847-1947”, a volume Kent wrote and designed to celebrate American freedom and democracy and the important role immigrants play in forming America’s national identity.

In 1948, Kent was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Associate member; he became a full Academician in 1966. Kent passed away due to a heart attack at his Adirondacks home in March of 1971 at the age of eighty-eight. He had participated in the 1936 formation of the American Artists’ Congress and later served as an officer of the Artists’ Union of America as well as the Artists’ League of America. In 1948, Kent had sought election as a New York Congressman under the American Labor Party banner.

New York’s Columbia University houses Rockwell Kent’s personal collection of thirty-three hundred working sketches and drawings, most of which were unpublished. The Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution houses an extensive collection of Kent’s correspondence. His work is contained in many private collections and is both housed and exhibited in major museums throughout the United States.

Notes: A May 2023 online edition of “Modernism/modernity” has an excellent and extensive article, written by Colgate University Visiting Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Jonathan Najarian, entitled “And Words Were Images to Him; Narrative Remediation in Rockwell Kent” located at: https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/najarian-narrative-remediation-rockwell-kent

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Rockwell Kent”, circa 1920, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Rockwell Kent, “Dan Ward’s Stack, Ireland”, 1926-1927, Oil on Canvas, 86 x 112 cm, Hermitage State Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Third Insert Image: Rockwell Kent, “Workers of the World, Unite!”, 1937, Wood Engraving on Paper, Cover Illustration for 1937 Issue of the New Masses, 20.3 x 15.2 cm, Plattsburgh State Art Museum, New York

Fourth Insert Image: Rockwell Kent, “Endless Energy for Limitless Living”, 1946, Oil on Canvas on Board, 111.8 x 121.9 cm, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio

Bottom Insert Image: Rockwell Kent, “Mountain Climber”, 1933, Wood Engraving on Paper, 20 x 14.9 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum