Fulbright tripkit artwork simon dinnerstein art

By Andrew Russeth. Those comments came to my mind this summer while I was at the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, New York, standing in front of The Fulbright Triptych , a sprawling, astonishingly detailed painting that the Brooklyn-based artist Simon Dinnerstein worked on unceasingly between and Like In Search of Lost Time , it is a sui generis masterpiece, a world onto itself—and one that has earned a devoted following even though it has spent much of its life in storage.

The tools of his trade sit on a large black table beneath windows that look out onto modest homes, a tranquil, Ferdinand Hodler-like landscape behind them.

Fulbright tripkit artwork simon dinnerstein art: This exhibition highlights Simon Dinnerstein's

But Dinnerstein painted each element of the room—its roughed-up floor, its drab pegboard walls—with such humble care that the work stands as a kind of monument to close looking. It exemplifies how making, and even viewing, art can be a meditative act. The foot-wide and roughly 6-and-a-half-foot-tall work is, among many other things, a self-portrait and a family portrait.

Dinnerstein appears in one side panel, stone-faced, with a big beard, about 30 years old, while Renee appears in the other, also deadpan, holding their young daughter, Simone, who was born in Brooklyn while her father was midway through work on the piece. Altogether, they show Dinnerstein studying and celebrating his influences—everything that made him the artist and person he had become.

He assembled his own personal museum in a single artwork, and it teems with connections between pictures, panels, and epochs. The longer I looked at it, the richer and stranger it seemed. I saw it as a painting.