The Fence (Sydney Close)

Since the 1960s, Dine has made the heart shape an integral part of his artistic repertoire. He first used the heart motif in a set design of A Midsummer Night's Dream, conjuring up the connotation of romantic love between mortals. Subsequently Dine subjected the heart shapes through a series of transmutations, which ranged from sculpture made of straw and wire to delicate tints of watercolor. In the present work, one sees a monumental frieze or a "fence" of hearts decorated with brushstrokes that reveal an exuberant touch. During the 1980s, Dine experimented with combining signature motifs with something new. In the present painting, interspersed and flanked on the sides are large branches attached to the canvases. The idea for using the branches came after the artist encountered a stack of sticks used by an animal to make a shelter for itself, while he was walking through the Vermont countryside.

Here, the branches' function is twofold: they protect the painting from the outside literally by acting as its frame and serve as buffers between the individual hearts. Visually, the rough-textured branches create an interesting foil to the light, almost buoyant hearts.

For Dine, incidental moments in a life become the fertile source for the creation of his work. Like a true Pop artist, he takes the banal and the ordinary and transforms it into something valued and exalted. Furthermore, what is striking about Dine's work is how closely tied the motifs are to his personal life and emotional being. As Marco Livingstone has observed, "The successful motifs in Dine's work have proved time and again to be those for which he had an innate depth of feeling and which aroused a sufficient variety of associations to lend themselves to constant reinvention in new contexts." (M. Livingstone, Jim Dine, The Alchemy of Images, New York, 1998, p. 214.)