DEAN DASS
“CLOUDS, FLARES, & FIREFILES”
Coming to Terms with Paul Klee
Often, I find images to work with on sci-fi television, on my grandchildren’s video games and YouTube channels, and in my own photographs of horizons, night-time skies, and fires. For me drawing may be mostly a separate enterprise and relates to my painting especially in theme. To speak of line and color working together, however, recalls Paul Klee. Klee’s Fish Magic: that modest in size, most complex, bejeweled painting/collage that hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Let’s admire that painting for more than all the glowing, colored spots. In Klee’s painting we see the lower creatures, so-called, undivided, living and swimming freely in eternity, while we, literally in this painting, are caught on the edge. We look out in observation while simultaneously looking inward. Klee writes about this in detail both in his diaries and in his pedagogical writings: we are both conscious and self-conscious. Following Klee, it has always appealed to me to try to configure our condition.
But over the course of this Pandemic, I found myself saying Paul Klee and Ursula Le Guin in the same sentence. Le Guin was writing in a genre that is now called – not Science- but Speculative Fiction. Can’t we apply that same category to Klee’s work? In asking who we are, I believe Klee also asks where we are going. With Klee it is a question of longing. I want to join them both in this kind of speculation.
Yet somehow, after many years, re-reading Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest did not inspire me to paint a beautiful primordial earth. Just the opposite. Humans wearing protective headgear and images of spaceships crashing come readily to mind.
The light on the horizon is dim. It’s a probably a city in flames seen in low-resolution. From this distance it’s hard to tell anything. Those are not clouds of fireflies. We remember clouds of fireflies as children running through fields.
Our skies are filled with dissonance, discord, and conflict.
Dean A. DassPUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Library of Congress, Rare Book Division
Brooklyn Museum of Art
Charlotte Printmaker's Society North Carolina
Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina
Des Moines Art Center; Des Moines, Iowa
Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas
Free Library of Philadelphia
George Mason University, Fenwick Library
Iowa State University, Ames
Jersey City Art Museum, New Jersey
Jyväskylä Art Museum, Jyväskylä, Finland
Louisiana State University, Rare Book Library, Baton Rouge
Louisiana State University, Hilliard University Art Museum
National Collection of Poland, Kraków
Nicholls State University, Rare Book Library
North Carolina Print & Drawing Society, Charlotte
Ohio State University, Rare Book Library
Philadelphia Museum of Art
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, W. Van Allen
Clark Library
State of Iowa, Herbert Hoover Building, Des Moines
Southern Graphics Council
Temple University, Philadelphia
University of Dallas, Irving
University of California, Santa Barbara, Rare Book Library
University of Central Florida, Rare Book Library
University of Colorado, Boulder, Rare Book Library
University of Denver, Special Collections Library
University of Iowa, Special Collections Library
University of Kansas, Lawrence
University of Nebraska, Kearney
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
University of North Carolina, Greensboro, Martha Blakeney
Hodges Special Collections
University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls
University of South Dakota, Vermillion
University of Southern Indiana
University of Tennessee, John C. Hodges Special Collections
Library
University of Virginia, Albert and Shirley Small Special
Collections Library
University of Virginia, Fralin Art Museum
University of Virginia Hospitals, Charlottesville
University of Wyoming Art Museum, Laramie
Virginia Commission for the Arts, Richmond
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Zuckerman Museum, Kennesaw State University
"Spreading Yellow Cloud"
2023 40x70" gouache, acrylic, ink, on paper mounted on panel
"Pale Blue Cloud“
32 x 60, 2022 gouache, acrylic, ink, marble dust
“Figures in Space“/Yellow Version
32 x 60, 2023
gouache, acrylic, ink, marble dust, pigments, pencil
Shipwreck 2022
22x42.5"
pencil, ink, collage, acrylic, gouache
“Two Blue Clouds Softly Illuminated”
2023
28.25x42”
Gouache, acrylic, marble dust, dragon’s blood On paper mounted on panel
(The deep red is the dragon’s blood, from Kremer pigments)
"Flares" 2023 48x72" oil on linen
Woman in a Helmet, 2023
Pencil, colored pencil, and ink on stained handmade paper
Man in a Helmet, 2023
Pencil, colored pencil, and ink on stained handmade paper
Cloud, 2022
Pencil, colored pencil, and ink on stained handmade paper
gouache, acrylic, ink, marble dust
"Pale Blue Cloud“ 34x67", 2022
"Helmet" 2023 13x18" pencil, ink, gouache, acrylic, marble dust, gold leaf
Fireflies Over a Landscape in Flames
2023
34x74.5"
oil over acrylic and gouache on paper mounted on panel
Shipwreck 2023 26.5x50" pencil, ink, acrylic, gouache, collage, pigments
