March 2025 Vol. 6, No.1
Robin Dintiman’s Naturalist Vulnerability, Intimacy and Grace
Death helps us understand life. Since the beginning of humanity, we have contemplated the existential cycles of life, in nature and within ourselves: birth, life, death, decay and renewal. To understand the essence of multidisciplinary artist, sculptor, videographer, photographer and educator Robin Dintiman, residing bi-coastally in Barryville, New York and Kenwood, California, we need to confront the concept of mortality.
Biology teaches us that death and decay are necessary to sustain renewal. A tree grows from a germinating seed and sprouts into a seedling, with roots and a shoot. It absorbs water and minerals from the soil and grows into a sapling, a small, young tree. The sapling matures into a fully grown adult tree, some of which live for hundreds and even thousands of years. When the mature tree dies, it decays, becomes a snag, a rotting log, and feeds nutrients back into the soil, sustaining forest biodiversity and ecosystem. The snag disintegrates and becomes organic matter in soil, sustaining the nutrients that new seeds need to restart the cycle over again.
Ultimately, in all cultures, accepting and understanding death defines our human experience. That’s why death is a key element in the arts, literature and music. Philosophers and theologians grapple with salvation, afterlife and reincarnation. How we view death, mortality and rebirth depends on our weltanschauung. A key teaching of Buddhism, for example, is to understand and accept the impermanence of life. In all societies, the death of loved ones is a terribly painful event. Everything is a process of transience and impermanence. It is our lot to bear.
The artist Robin Dintiman is a naturalist, not as in the art movement, but as someone who is integrally connected with nature and who understands that nature is our source of life, wholeness and unity with the earth and our fellow species. To express these forces and ideas artistically, she has internalized nature as both her inspiration and her medium for her sculptures and installations. Her artistic process is a form of self-preservation, of catharsis and as a self-therapeutic act. Artistic expression is her way of processing and coping with personal loss, grief, and traumatic psychological events. She embodies the cycle of life by using organic material and objects she finds in nature –innovative, improvisational and arrhythmic.
“Love yourself well and be able to love others well”
As a Buddhist, her life experience, connection with nature and her artistic process have led her to sage wisdom and a state of grace. She told that she was with some Stanford think-tank genius types, all men, and they were discussing what they thought the most important thing in the world was. When they asked Dintiman, she said that she thinks the hardest and most important thing in the world is to learn to love well – to “Love yourself well and be able to love others well”. That’s a good life – not success, not money, not accumulation, but to be able to die knowing you loved well. Quiet fell over the group, as they were silenced by boundless love. Learn to love well!
The artist explained, “My work is focused on the transience of life, in the meaning, fragility or vulnerability in our physical bodies, which I see reflected in nature around me. Most of my workplaces are in very highly wooded areas. Here in Kenwood, I’m looking at mountains and hundreds of acres of state park. Back East, where I was raised along the Hudson River, I also have studio in the woods, with bears, mountain lions and coyotes. The exposure to the cycle of life is something that is an essential part of the work and has been for a very long time.”
Tragedy, death and caregiving impacted her and informed her art. “I lived a very intense life. I was aware from a very young age that, because of being exposed to nature, we’re fragile, like when a tree that I loved fell. My dog died. My fish died. In 1998, my close friend and colleague died suddenly after a surgery, and my mother died ten months later in ’99. My sister was diagnosed with cancer too. It was an onslaught of caregiving. From 1998 to ’99 to current time, I have been caregiving to people’s departure from this earth – about eight people – five members of my family were sick and died in seven months in 2016-’17. My previous husband had 10 years of cancer and died. When you go through that it impacts your life and, in my case, my art.”
She channeled these profound events into powerful art – heavy, organic, natural, joyous, yet slightly disturbing. No gentle subtleties. Dintiman, the nemophilist, hits hard, fiercely expressive like nature’s force itself. It’s like a primal scream in the forest, the sort of work that is created regardless of whether anyone was ever going to see it or not. Her love for natural forms allows a deep introspection into personal themes. She is on one level an art theorist and on another plane a freeform expressionist with an underpinning of unrestrained ideas, conveying the delicate interplay between life and death. Joseph Heinrich Beuys would be proud. Her vulnerabilities transcended into bold, thunderous rhythms. When this writer gazes at her sculptures and installations, with her profound element of spontaneity, he hears a thunderous African drum circle led by Babatunde Olatunji with twenty drummers. Dintiman’s beat shakes you up just a little, with a mix of beauty and complexity. She hits us with primal force, back to the basics, as even our prehistoric creativity was nature-inspired. Dintiman’s work is gritty, raw and rough-hewn, like the blues. Yet stunningly beautiful as every piece represents nature, and nothing can be more beautiful than the natural.
“The focus of my work is on nature, on art grafted from nature. The most complex human syntax is how and why things die, how we regard or treat them in this process of transition. Where they go is a question mark. I make salvage art – meaning I use things that have been discarded by nature. Branches that crashed out of a tree. All kinds of things, because they represent time and fragility. I use a lot of dried flowers – many things that have faded. All of that reflects a consistent thread throughout my work. It’s an intimate focus on why things die and how we regard them in this process of transition. I didn’t plan that. That happened to me. I try to intricately explore that in every piece. The things I find in nature reflect decay or detritus, stuff that shows age – whether it’s wood or roots of a tree. Connecting it to making art brings out the Qi energy in Asian cultures and the Greek eros – the archetypal life force. In creating, you rise above the loss, the death.”
Uniquely, she works with eco-friendly materials and grows skin membranes from bacterium to make art, “That material, when I take it out of its bath, it grows into textiles and into other objects. My grandfather was a botanist who died before I was born. In his botany primers he had solutions to make stuff out of. One was a paper water solution with ambient yeast, and the yeast forms this bacterium, which I replicated. I also made crystals and all kinds of stuff, like a mushroom mycelium growth for sculpture. Working with his solutions gives me a feeling of connectedness – I can brew roots back to his work.”
She was influenced by poet, feminist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna St. Vincent Millay, who once aptly said, “I love humanity, but I hate people.” Dinitman created a book of photos and writing on the death of Vincent Millay titled The Materiality of Being Invisible. Plus, she was in an Artists-in-Residence at Millay Arts, the historic estate of Edna St. Vincent Millay, where she completed two sculptures connected to the spirit of Millay.
“Intuition has guided my life’s work. I’ve read theory and art history and then I put it all away and I make the work. I’ve studied a lot. I’m a Zen Buddhist. Quantum physics is inherent in Zen, the 10 points of direction. Our thinking is usually three-dimensional. Quantum physics pushes it to four. In Buddhism it goes to 10 directions. Then you have the past, present and future all happening at the same time, which is what quantum physics is. I study science and listen to books about it on tape, because when you have people die there are things that happen that are unexplainable -– physical things, real things. What does happen? Where do people’s soul go? Where’s their energy, the vibrancy that we knew they had? This is the crux of my work, and you see it in nature too. I photographed a series of trees in California over 30 years – and they all changed. I photographed them at different stages as a marker of ultimately the problem of climate change. The strength of those trees gave me strength to live through all this loss.”
Robin Dintiman’s vast curriculum vitae reflects an illustrious career spanning half of a century, a lifetime of artistic excellence and critical acclaim. She has won numerous prestigious awards and engaged in artist residencies and national/international exhibits. She spent seminal time in Kyoto, Japan, as part of the Widener Traveling Fellowship. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in education with honors, from the Moore College of Art Textiles /Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.She studied at the Haystacks School of Crafts, with a scholarship, in Deer Isle, Maine, and at the Pratt Graphics Center in New York City. She earned a Master’s in Fine Arts in sculpture/printmaking, with highest distinction, from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California. She also completed a mid-career residency at the prestigious Cooper Union, in New York City. Her works are included in permanent collections of the Philadelphia Art Museum, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the Chrysler Museum and The Arkansas Museum of Art, Grace Cathedral San Francisco and Toyobo Senior Center, Osaka. She is a member of A.I.R. the oldest women’s organization in Brooklyn, New York.
A voluminous book could be filled with her experiences. One story stands out as she was particularly impressed by her residency in Japan, “It was supposed to only be a month or so and it ended up being almost a year. I was working with Ningen Kokuho, which are the national treasures of the arts in Japan – as set up after World War II. It was quite an amazing education, because they were not used to working with women, especially not American women. There was a guy who didn’t speak one word of English. He just asked to see my hands before he accepted me. He just looked at my hands and he turned them over and said, “Oh, okay, you’re an artist.” That was the entire admission process. Then I sat there practicing with a sumi brush painting ink lines – just lines across a page all day long – as straight as I could make them with a brush. It was all about the discipline. In another place I was indigo dyeing, and in another stenciling with rice paste to make fabric. I learned a lot of different skills including vegetable dyeing. In one of the places, I was working with a bunch of young women from the different islands in Japan. They spoke minimal English but by then I could converse well in Japanese. One day we played a game to list important things about different countries. For example, Italy was the Pope or pasta. Switzerland was chocolate; and then England was the Queen.
When it came to America they had a different idea completely. It was the idea of freedom and the Statue of Liberty. That pivotal moment made me realize that these women were in a confined environment. They saw the freedom that I had to come to Japan, to do whatever I wanted. Then, I realized that I had taken stuff like that for granted. When I came back, I completely changed my idea about what I was going to do with my then textile art education background. I was going to become a fine artist. I came back and I made huge five-story rope sculpture, hanging off the buildings at Moore, which is right in downtown Philly. The people in my art department were very upset. They didn’t approve of this work as my thesis work for graduating. I had to go outside my department in sculpture and printmaking.”
The freedom she has, as realized as a young woman in Japan, has defined her life’s work. She loves nature, and nature loves her. Perhaps Emmylou Harris lyric best articulated Dintiman’s path and artistic pinnacle:
Lookin’ for the water from a deeper well
I rocked with the cradle and I rolled with the rage
I shook those walls and I rattled that cage
Took my trouble down a dead end trail
Reachin’ out a hand for a holier grail.
Frank Matheis, Writer
Frank Matheis is a music, arts and culture writer and a contributing writer to the Inspiration Art Group International. His current book project is titled “Outrage Channeled in Verse – American Protest Songs in the Trump Era.” He is the co-author of the book ‘Sweet Bitter Blues’ with National Heritage Fellow Phil Wiggins (University Press of Mississippi, 2020). His column ‘In Other Words’ features member artists in all disciplines and general arts essays. He is also a contributing writer to Living Blues magazine (Center for Southern Culture Studies) and the publisher/editor of thecountryblues.com. Frank was formerly an award-winning radio producer. He is also a published photographer, curator and video producer.