Roger Dean’s wildly popular art is Xx instantly recognizable from the I covers of classic rock albums, and as the inspiration of the landscapes of the blockbuster movie Avatar, and has been published as millions of posters and books. His beautiful paintings were contemptuously brushed away as proletarian fantasy by the bony aestheticians of the old New York hegemony, but when it is properly placed in the context of art history and globalization, it becomes clear that his work captures perfectly the zeitgeist of our cross-cultural time. His career as a successful professional painter began in the 1960s, as post-modern artists first began challenging the power of the New York avant-garde, and began combining creative techniques and compositional crafts gathered from traditions around the globe into new hybrid forms.
As a young man, Dean lived in Hong Kong, where he became familiar with the ancient Chinese compositional technique known as shan shui hua, which reached its peak during the Song dynasty between 960 and 1279 CE. He has been completely consistent to its use throughout his career. The delicate, smoky atmospheric perspective of Song landscape paintings is created by carefully balancing three areas of the composition—the near, the middle and the far. The far” is the softest edged part of the composition, at the top of the image. The middle ground is clearer, but detail is most crisp in the foreground. As well as using the conventions of shan shui hua, Dean is fond of painting unusually exaggerated geological formations, developing them from the characteristic mythic mountains of Chinese landscape paintings like Shen Zhou’s exquisite Ming dynasty scroll, Lofty Mount Lu, of 1467.
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Denne historien er fra Natural Beauty-utgaven av American Art Collector.
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Guardians of the Temple – Simon Dinnerstein reflects on The Fulbright Triptych 50 years later.
The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University exhibits Simon Dinnerstein's The Fulbright Triptych haunts the visual lexicon of 20th century American representational art. Fifty years have passed since Dinnerstein completed the painting in 1974.
A City Perspective
Leslie Gaduzo has always been interIested in art. Since childhood, he has been drawing constantly, from single point perspective drawings at age 10 to complex architectural drawings.
Living Legacy
The Butler Institue hosts Allied Artists of America's 110th Annual Juried Exhibition.
Elegant yet Approachable
The second edition of the RTIA Show presents even more art to explore and expanded special programming.
Figuratively Speaking
New York has always been an epicenter of artists on the edge of excellence, pushing the envelope and finding their voices.
JAMES AYERS: The Importance of Play
Like many artists, James Ayers' work took a turn during the Covid-19 pandemic. Seeing the enjoyment his kids took from playing with paint in his studio and exploring their creativity inspired him.
GINA MINICHINO: Playing with Food
Gina Minichino started her journey in visual arts because of Charles Schulz. \"He was my earliest influence for drawing and the reason I wanted to be a cartoonist,\" she says.
Island Light
The Cuttyhunk Island Artists' Residency is held in a sprawling, 100-year-old house on an island off the southern coast of Massachusetts.
Solitary Forms
Hogan Brown has been working with Arcadia Contemporary for two and half years and is excited to be featured in his first solo show at the gallery. He doesn't take for granted the many talented figurative painters Arcadia represents and is thrilled to be among them.
Living the Dream
Counterintuitively, David Gluck was a painter before taking up tattooing little more than a decade ago. While skin is a completely different substrate and ink a far cry from oil paint, the skills must be transferrable to some degree because there is a wait-time of nine months to get an appointment with him.