Arty Farty Hearty Friday ~ Jim Dine, His and Our Hearts

Jim Dine, one of the original painters of Pop Art in the 1960s, has a birthday tomorrow. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on 16 June 1935.
Over more than four decades according to THIS website:

Dine has produced more than three thousand paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, as well as performance works, stage and book designs, poetry, and even music. His art has been the subject of numerous individual and group shows and is in the permanent collections of museums around the world. Renowned for his wit and creativity as a Pop and Happenings artist, he has a restless, searching intellect that leads him to challenge himself constantly. (Very Gemini!) .........Objects, most importantly household tools, began to appear in his work at about the same time; a hands-on quality distinguished these pieces, which combine elements of painting, sculpture, and installation, as well as works in various other media, including etching and lithography. Through a restricted range of obsessive images, which continue to be reinvented in various guises - bathrobe, heart, outstretched hand, wrought-iron gate, and Venus de Milo - Dine presents compelling stand-ins for himself and mysterious metaphors for his art.

It's the obsession with hearts on which I'm concentrating here, rather than the rest of Mr Dine's work. Examples of his other subjects can be seen via a Google Image search.

Why hearts? Because I am married to a guy who displays a similar obsession - no, that's a bit hyperbolic. My husband likes heart symbols and has collected small sculptures of them for years. During our first few years together he used to hide little hearts all over the place for me to find.....until, after filling various receptacles with them, I respectfully and lovingly but whole-heartedly asked him to desist. There are still one or two tiny hearts hidden on tops of door frames and in the recesses of purses. We also have one or two larger heart sculptures, collected at arts fairs or in antique/junk stores.

But - back to Jim Dine's natal chart. A quick gander at this, then at a few of his hearts, then a look at one or two of ours.



In looking at the charts of artists specialising in Pop Art my first thought used to be to look for Uranus and/or Aquarius. I realised that this isn't necessarily correct when looking at charts of Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichenstein in a post HERE. Aquarius is a mentally oriented sign given to analysis, often interested in politics of one stripe or another. The fact that Pop Art burst onto the scene in the 1960s along with the Beatles, Hair, etc. etc. certainly smacks of Uranus though.

Jim Dine is younger than Warhol and Lichenstein, his style is certainly much softer than Warhol's whose chart is very Fiery. Lichenstein's is more Watery, and akin to Dine's - but still has not many similarities.

Saturn may have more connection to Pop Art than is obvious on first thought. Subject matter tended to be everyday objects, things, solids.....Saturn?

For Dine's astro art signature I'll go for the Yod (Finger of Fate) linking sextiled Venus(Art) and Mars(energy) with Saturn via two quincunx (150*) aspects. Saturn at the apex is the "channel" for his artistic temperament.

Dine's Airy, fairly late Gemini Sun is conjunct Mercury in ultra-sensitive Cancer - possibly his draw to draw hearts?

To be honest, I don't see the amount of avant garde in this chart I'd have expected. Dine was thought "a bit of a rebel". I don't see that in the chart. His Sagittarius Moon could incline him to "overdo" things - go too far at times, maybe that's the key.

A few examples of Dine's hearty art:










A SCANT FEW FROM OUR OWN HEART COLLECTION, there are lots more!