The Art of Roger Dean

Roger Dean’s visionary artwork kindles the human spirit. Through his brushstrokes, boulders levitate, dwellings sprout from the earth, and pathways beckon into landscapes where the physical and the spiritual become one.

Roger’s art has a paradoxical affect; it transports us into an imaginative realm but it can also make us feel at home in the physical world we inhabit. Like many Yes fans, I became enchanted by Roger’s work as a teen growing up in the 1970’s. Roger’s fantastical landscapes were the perfect complement to the ethereal soundscapes Yes were creating in their heyday.

Yes is a band that paints pictures with sound, but their music is undoubtedly enhanced by Roger’s often sublimely serendipitous artwork. The music on albums like Fragile, Close to the Edge, Relayer, and Tales from Topographic Oceans can stand alone, but there is no doubt that Roger’s cover art for these albums fuses with the music to create a more total and encompassing aesthetic experience.

There is a timeless quality to Roger’s art, but in many ways his art seems way ahead of our times. The world of Pandora depicted in James Cameron’s sci-fi blockbuster, Avatar, seems like it was lifted directly from Roger’s imagination. The characters on Pandora tame winged dragons, which fly amidst gravity-defying island boulders sprouting trees. Images like these are familiar to Dean’s fans.

The inhabitants of Pandora exhibit a theme which permeates Roger’s artwork: namely, they are a people that live in close harmony with their natural environment. This motif has always made Roger’s artwork very attractive to me. The idea that homes and buildings could be an extension of the environment and blend in with it has always seemed to me an ideal worth realizing. Today, many architects are pursuing something along the lines of Dean’s visionary approach to architecture. For instance, the Metropol Parasol in Seville (Spain) and the Mediatheque Library in Tokyo (Japan) both utilizes tree like patterns to create environments that are as habitable psychologically as they are physically.

Much of modern architecture and our suburban and urban landscapes are alienating. Architects who utilize patterns and motifs from natural phenomenon like trees may be onto something, in so far as they create buildings that remind us of and reconnect us with the natural world. Roger has long voiced his belief that “journeying through a physical landscape can be a spiritual experience.” In a way, I believe that is the goal of art; to fuse the physical and the spiritual.

Roger’s artwork points in the direction of mankind living in harmony with the natural environment. His landscapes invite our imaginations to participate in worlds that are ideal, something more than real, but not quite impossible. Roger’s work is timeless because it can transport us into a future where art and reality become one.