Tina York’s unseen realities on exhibit at South Dennis Art Gallery

Let’s be realistic. Some of us are just more talented than others.
Some are artistic. Some are musicians. Some are scientists. Some are operatic divas.
Tina York has been all of those. OK, she’s not an operatic diva; so she’s been almost all of them.
York, whose work will be on exhibit at the South Dennis Art Gallery during the next six weeks, also has her paintings in museums in her native Germany and Japan.
NASA has even commissioned her to witness and record the launching of the space shuttle Endeavor. Her painting 2092 A.D. is based on a 1992 Endeavor mission that captured the Intelsat satellite.
And for the pharmaceutical company Merck, she portrayed the formation of cholesterol in the human arterial system.
This all seems distanced from her earliest accomplishments. Attending an East German conservatory of music at age 8, York was performing as a violin soloist with the Dresden Staatskapelle orchestra before she was 10.
But the child prodigy knew music was not her calling.
“When you are a musician, you are always re-creating someone else’s creation,” she said in a recent telephone interview from the South Dennis Art Gallery. “Besides, there already was a great violinist—Jascha Heifetz!
“Violinists have to practice every day,” she explained. “They have to create tones, unlike a piano, where the tones are already there. No violinist can afford not to practice. Heifetz practiced four hours a day, every day.”
Art replaced music in her life early on, and she apprenticed under American artist George Dergalis for eight years, learning everything from art history to how to work in acrylics, watercolors, and multi-media constructions.
Striving to understand the creative force she saw in the great masters, she completed a degree in psychology at Brandeis, then moved on to study the physical aspects of the body by studying medicine at New York Medical College, becoming increasingly intrigued with what she was seeing through the microscope.
“I wanted to know the human body,” she said. “In three years of medical college, I saw so much. An artist doesn’t just draw the outside; you have to know the inside. You begin to look at the body differently.”
York, who now splits her time between New Jersey and Florida, has actually done 54 paintings based on scans of the electron microscope.
“I do very little that is realistic,” she explained. “What I do is strictly art. Realism is not my strength.
“An artist sees the world then tucks it away,” she continued. “When you paint, those previous images come back to you, and you create what you wish the world did look like.”
Realistic images may not be her specialty, but she has done three commissions for NASA. Oddly enough, those commissions were for virtual realism. For this, she had to be trained.
“NASA trained me for a whole day in virtual reality,” she said. “People think virtual reality is just a picture, but it’s much more.”
York worked with original photos of a planet, then made a painting of the virtual reality computer images.
“We then have a picture of a planet we have never set foot on,” she said, “but they are not realistic.”
She has taken commissions that may have started out as realistic pictures, but, she ultimately noted, “As always, I’m holding the brush.”
One good example of a “sort of” realistic painting is her beautiful Pink Saguaro, a colorful painting of a cactus plant against an Arizona sunset.
“I lived in Arizona,” she said, “and I was impressed by those cacti, but the (actual) sunset is not quite that color.”
York’s work will be on display and for sale at South Dennis Art Gallery, 927 South Dennis Road in Court House (609-231-8132), and she herself with be present in the 1,000 square foot facility (she’ll be out of town from June 16-23) throughout the exhibition.
“This is a gorgeous gallery,” she said, “and there is a grand opening being planned sometime in the future.”
But before that grand opening, York’s grand impressions of what she wished the world looked like will be on display.
Now if we could only get her some operatic lessons, the package would be complete, and perhaps she could even handle the aria from Carmen as she displayed her art.
Given her accomplishments thus far, we shouldn’t be surprised.