The Secret PATHWAY

The Fantastical Landscapes of Roger Dean and Freyja Dean

- MICHAEL PEARCE

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.