by Andy John Mendosa
Dylan Rose Rheingold is a Visual Artist born and based in NYC. Her work has been featured internationally in ArtPremium Paris- Generation Z Artists on the Rise, Vogue Italia, Gotham Magazine, Hamptons Magazine & Office Magazine. She has also exhibited in group shows in Florence, Manhattan & Upstate New York.
Obviously a really shitty year for everyone, but I’ve been working a lot, which has been good. I started my first year of grad school at SVA. I started my application back in September of 2019 and found out I got in around the same time that Covid got out of control in March and schools started shutting down. I tried to postpone but the scholarship they gave me was only set for these two specific years, and I couldn’t go back to school without it.
I’m really happy with them. I think SVA is making the most out of it. All my classes and crits are on zoom. You just have to document your work beforehand and present it online. The grad studios are still open so I’ve still been able to work in my studio most days. Obviously you have to wear masks, you can’t have guests, eat there, and the access is limited to around 9 or 10 PM for cleaning, but it’s definitely not the worst thing in the world.
When I went to Syracuse I got my BFA in illustration with a focus in editorial work. So advertising, artwork to pair with articles, more design type stuff. I realized when you work like that you cater to your client or whatever you’re working around. Messages have to be very direct. There’s not a lot of openness to interpretation there. My education now is the opposite. It’s so open-ended and subjective. The program is a general MFA fine arts program so even though I’m going for painting, I’m also learning with performance and video artists as well as sculptors. There’s a bunch of painters, but in my current crit classes, no one is really doing figurative work. One of my mentors makes sculptures & installation work and my other professor is more of an art historian & scholar.
The way they taught at Syracuse was if you wanted to get stylistic or abstract you’d have to learn or understand the basics of realism first, so you had to take a bunch of live figure drawing classes and realistic oil painting assignments before you could go off and do your own thing. I’m happy that’s the way I was taught, because when I look at abstract paintings I enjoy seeing how things make sense, whereas sometimes you see some trying to be abstract, and it can be too much for me. Like I’m constantly just asking myself “Is this genuine, are these marks intentional?”.
The way they taught at Syracuse was if you wanted to get stylistic or abstract you’d have to learn or understand the basics of realism first, so you had to take a bunch of live figure drawing classes and realistic oil painting assignments before you could go off and do your own thing. I’m happy that’s the way I was taught, because when I look at abstract paintings I enjoy seeing how things make sense, whereas sometimes you see some trying to be abstract, and it can be too much for me. Like I’m constantly just asking myself “Is this genuine, are these marks intentional?”.
Well it’s funny because recently I’ve been really into folk & outsider art which is ironic because pretty much all of those artists lack formal training. So I kind of sound like a hypocrite saying these things because outsider and folk artists are purely just doing their own thing. But I love the rawness of it.
When I started making art as a kid, I had a lot of anxiety and it became a really good coping mechanism for me. Drawing and painting really just makes me happy. It always makes me feel calm. A sort of conflict/solution type situation- not that I’m coming to any answers. It’s an easy way to express a lot of questions or concerns or things that bother you or things you’re passionate about.
Someone asked me that a few weeks ago, “Why aren’t you making works about anxiety or making it about the root of that?”. The answer is it’s honestly not the conversation I’m trying to have. It’s just the source of it. My line work is really messy and all over the place, and that's subconscious, there’s nothing intentional there, but I’m sure that’s always kind of played into it. Maybe I’m saying this because I did illustration for so long, but so much of my work is just storytelling.
Since I started my MFA, I’ve been digging into my familial archives. I’ve always been attracted to more than anything just diversity and differences in people. Anyone who stands out to me that I feel some sort of attraction or relationship to artistically, I try to recreate them in my work. Recently I’ve been going through family photo albums and building an archive from those. It’s a bit ironic because I’m not that close with all my family and I’m doing all this research. My family is all over the place in terms of roots though. Like, my mom was born in Japan, her dad was a marine, and her mom was also Peruivian, then they moved to a military base in the states. Now that family is very blue collar, doing working class jobs and stuff. Then my Dad’s side is totally different, they’re like fourth generation, white, jewish, old-school Brooklyn, and then they have cousins who are from Colombia too.
So I’m looking through old photo albums from my Colombian cousin’s bat mitzvah that's burlesque themed in Miami. Just like damn, iconic.
The town I grew up in was very Catholic-Irish, so there wasn’t a lot of diversity. But getting older, going to college, studying in Florence, having new experiences, I’ve learned to be really happy with the idea of differences. They’re things to be proud of and they shouldn’t be tucked away to blend in. I feel like it’s really hard for kids to recognize. I feel like it’s hard for adults to recognize too. But that’s what I’ve been playing with through my research and reflection.
Yeah something I want to make known more than anything in my work is the element of pride. A lot of feedback recently has been questionable in terms of people interpreting my work as me looking at them from afar rather than me standing with them. More than anything I want to embrace and be prideful.
For example, Martin Parr and Diane Arbus are two of my favorite photographers who are both famous for capturing people and situations that are quite out there. Recently my mentor and I had an interesting conversation about them in regards to exploitation and where the artist is coming from. He helped me realize how important the element of internal perspective is.
I feel like Parr is in some cases exposing his subjects in a way that is for humor or irony, whereas Arbus is connecting to them and highlighting from a place within that is meaningful and comforting. I think that’s really important to me in terms of perspective in my own work.
Recently I’ve been very into experimenting with mixed media. I can’t wait on oil because I’m not patient enough. I don’t use pencil to outline beforehand on canvas. In my sketchbook I try and do a lot of thumbnailing and loose drawings. The content is usually planned but the painting becomes mechanical to me the more I plan, so I like to keep it spontaneous and natural as much as possible. I tend to favor the whole experience of creating over the final product.