bio

Larry Dinkin was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1943. When he was five, his family moved to Queens, New York. As a child, he drew cars, trains, and airplanes. But that was no different than what many children were drawing. In his early teens, he would visit a neighbor’s house where a copy of a painting, Grant Wood’s The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, was hung. (Readers can Google this image.) Dinkin was drawn to this image. He found this picture captivating and charming, like a well-made miniature. It was not a copy of reality – it was a creation. Dinkin’s fascination with this image reflects an innate level of visual sensitivity that formed the foundation of his aesthetics.
 

While in high school, he would go to the large central library in Queens just to look at art and illustration books. The photographically realistic paintings did not interest him. What he found visually exciting were paintings that were stylistic and possessed energetic calligraphy, such as the works of the illustrator Daniel Schwartz, the oil sketches of Rubens, Rembrandt’s drawings, and George Bellows’ paintings. Within these images, he could see the artist’s hand at work and discern how these paintings were constructed. Images, not the text, were his interest. The images were everything. Later on, Dinkin took several art courses at Pratt Institute, The School of Visual Arts, and various art classes while attending the City College of New York. Unfortunately, he absorbed little in these classes because he was not committed to painting at that time. He dabbled, producing a few paintings and drawings. In Dinkin’s early twenties, he became interested in photography. The photographs of Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, George Hurrell, Horst P. Horst, and Richard Avedon enthralled him. These images absorbed him for hours on end and still do. He purchased a 35mm camera and an assortment of lenses and built a darkroom. Within a few years he realized that to be a photographer who captured scenessuch as Cartier-Bresson did, he would have to carry a camera virtually at all times and spend a lifetime looking for images to shoot. He concluded that photography did not suit his personality. Photography is primarily about the subject matter, and that, for him, meant visual limitations. He needed to be in a studio by himself, and imagine, construct, and “build” the image. Although he uses the phrase “construct and build,” which requires planning and designing, Dinkin understood that the sine qua non for creating a work of art is vision. Painting was to be his form of self-expression. Over the next fifty years, he achieved both critical and commercial success. Forty-five prominent museums worldwide, including the White House, have acquired his work for their permanent collections. The names and locations of the museums and a list of retrospectives and solo museum exhibitions can be found in the Curriculum Vitae section.