Many feature fragments of Southwestern landscape. They are like memories of looking at travel brochures of the states, dreaming of going to places like Arizona or New Mexico, where the hot sun drenches rocks and clouds with color. Maps also appear, routes twist and turn into wiggly forms that might be rivers.
Stamps, maps and patterns related to folk art connote a theme of ‘‘going places,” of being metaphorically carried from one place to another. They recall the excitement of real vacations, or memories of the same. For Dean herself, they draw on time lived in southern California, Arizona and Texas, and of a special infatuation with the aesthetic culture of Santa Fe.
Dean spent many years painting what, by her own estimation, were competent but uninspired ‘‘Cézannesque” landscapes. Direct experience of the power, emotion, patterns and colors of Southwestern folk art triggered the turning point for her work. Moreover, although she frequently paints in oils, her masterful use of watercolor and ink, as seen here, provided a ‘‘quick means,” she says, to expand her visual vocabulary and test ways to link meaningful motifs and ideas in new ways. These watercolors, with their experimental approach, represent yet another stage in Dean’s trajectory.
‘‘Around the Next Bend” is a good example. On the left is a realistic rendering of a yellow cactus flower on a pedestal; beyond it is a reddening mountain form against a blue sky with clouds. On the right are overlaid forms that look like cutouts from different colored or printed papers. A window-like opening on the right shows a vista of a canyon, while a curvaceous yellow abstract shape bordered in pink occupies the center. The effect is magical.
Trips out West with her astronomer husband, and a copy of a popular early 16th century print showing a scholar breaking through the starry sphere to see the worlds beyond provided the sources for ‘‘The Mail Must Get Through.” In this large and particularly interesting work, the effect of layering and spatial disjunctions give a sense of moving from one place to the next. A swag of stars curves in from the upper right, meeting a sky filled with purplish clouds. Pastel mountains rise up behind an inset of stamps with prairie scenes on them, and an aerial view of a snaking river. As the Renaissance print expresses the quest to understand the realities that lie beyond the visible world, so Dean’s painting offers a glimpse of a mental construct that merges the known and fantasy worlds. Through time and space, the mail must get through.
Some of the paintings are fundamentally abstract, but draw from the same basic pool of imagery. ‘‘A Gathering of Forces” was among my favorites, a work that seems to evoke the movement in nature before a gathering storm, with clouds passing over a body of water, a large cactus flower and a tray of rocks connoting permanence. Similarly, the bright pink tones of ‘‘Cross Roads” suggest travel to exotic places. The latter contains little images of boats, one that looks like a medieval woodcut of a ship and the other a brand new sailboat.
I was most drawn to the compositions with juxtapositions of realist elements and abstract shapes. Dean is a marvelous draftswoman. Her ability to draw and play with pictorial space is paramount to the success of these images. In works like ‘‘Western Vistas for 25 Cents” or even more dramatically, ‘‘Route 89A Cancelled,” she brings together passages of Southwestern patterns that appear flattened against the picture plane. With these are perspective views of the rock formations like those near Four Corners, or other Southwestern phenomena. ‘‘Route 89A Cancelled” includes a bit of map with a meandering Route 89, and a cancelled stamp. In part, that interaction between spatial illusion in the perspectival views and the ambiguity of form in the abstract areas provide the greatest visual impact here. For the rest, it’s the color. ‘‘Trust and Preservation,” a more realist image, is a fairly open plea for environmental protection that will touch most viewers. In any case, these images will lure each individual to find their full meaning within his or her own experience.
