The Fulbright Triptych Revisited

Rita York

An artist’s studio, his inner sanctum – I wonder if the creative process, and the mystery of life itself, shall be here revealed. I wonder if the secrets shall be hidden in plain sight, as I unfold the panels of a triptych begun in Germany, and enter the room where it happens.

I search to understand the magic by which a dauntingly blank, three-panel wood canvas becomes the repository of those secrets. There are tantalizing clues – a child’s scrawl, fragments of transformational art, snippets of writing – even a quote from the great novel, Moby Dick: “To me the white whale is that wall shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond.” I read it, and I feel the artist’s—and man’s—existential dread before that ghostly wall.

In awe of that primordial blank expanse, that white whale whose challenge must be met, the artist organizes the nothingness with his finely honed weapons and his penetrating vision. He precisely, relentlessly, anoints the void with color, with oblique meaning, with textures and lines and geometric shapes, inserting heritage and humanity and enigma within the geometry. He organizes our gaze as he has organized his studio.

It is a secular and modern triptych, yet filled with quiet spirituality – reverence for the holy trinity of the artist’s family, for the comforting warmth of his home, for the tools of his trade, for the rich, classical, artistic past to which he is heir and which inspires him, for the rectangular mementos of mundane existence which give him daily sustenance.

I lift each miniature pinned-up homage to the simple and profound in art and in life, to past and present, in order to peer through the wormholes beneath and unmask the triptych’s truth. I pry open the studio’s painted windows to look past the Edenic blue horizon to decipher a more complicated German landscape. I admire the meticulously aligned, sharply pointed instruments which carve answers in hieroglyphics into a copper plate.

Composed, eyes focused, princely in blue velvet, humble in work boots, balanced by love of family and love of art, Simon Dinnerstein beckons us through the event horizon of that mystical glowing gold-leaf copper portal at the center of it all, to dimensions beyond the studio, where past, present, and future exist all at once, where our invisible map is drawn.

Upon taking leave of the triptych, I fold the sides inward once more, so Simon and his wife, Renee, can now hold hands as they fling open the studio windows, with only the golden talisman between them. I step back to meditate on the eternal challenge of the looming void—the 2 closed, blank canvases that now face me—and I wonder if there are, beyond that event horizon, yet 2 more panels for the artist to anoint.


Rita York: teacher, photographer, writer, student of the fine arts