Artwork Description
Jim Dine – Watercolor Face
Dimensions: 41 x 28″ paper / 39 x 26″ approx. plate
Year: 2010
Medium: lithograph, hand watercolor
Edition: AP, ed. 7
Jim Dine (b. 1935) is one of the top contemporary artists in the US, and his works are included in major museums throughout the world. He devoted several years to a personal interpretation of a story that has engaged and intrigued him for much of his life, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. Dine has made his own the tale of the temptations, trials, tribulations, and ultimate triumph of this mischievous but endearing wooden boy in a series of thirty-nine prints published by Steidl.
Of his fascination with Pinocchio, who first appeared in his prints in 1998, Dine writes: “Thanks to Carlo Collodi, the real creator of Pinocchio, I have for many years been able to live thru the wooden boy…. His poor burned feet, his misguided judgment, his vanity about his large nose, his temporary donkey ears all add up to the real sum of his parts. In the end it is his great heart that holds me.” Dine perceives that “this idea of a talking stick becoming a boy, it’s like a metaphor for art, and it’s the ultimate alchemical transformation.” His Geppetto is a self-portrait, alluding to the artist as creator, who in giving life has a connection with the Divine.