Roger Dean's landscapes

 
In 2013, the Royal Academy staged a comprehensive exhibition ‘Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape’. The argument of the display, elaborated in its catalogue, was that the development of landscape painting in the 18th century was dominated by a variety called ‘topography’, and sometimes ‘strict topography’, committed to ‘the accurate recording of particular places’: artists like Paul Sandby (1731-1809), who began as a map-maker, and carried a cartographic precision of representation over into his accomplished landscape watercolours; or Michael Angelo Rooker (1746-1801), who worked scrupulously in oils and watercolours. But in the early 19th century, however, topographical art was ‘transcended by something much more serious and more powerful, a sublime style of painting that sought to represent the grandeur of nature’ rather than accurately to reproduce it, and by exaggerating, distorting, or augmenting and inventing, to produce in viewers ‘feelings of awe, fear or horror’. The great master of this new landscape art was Turner, whose landscape painting moved beyond ‘particular places’ to generate something that ‘transcended all particularity’ 

Roger Dean’s visual style is very different to Turner’s—his idiom is clarity and contour rather than Turner’s ur-impressionist haze, and his preferred colour palette tends bluer and greener than Turner's—but we could argue that he develops this tradition of sublime landscape art. His alien worlds, many created as cover-art for albums by the rock band Yes, tend to be images of fantastical and alien landscapes, precariously tapering escarpments, arching structured stone, sinuous rivers, waterfalls flowing into open space, odd-looking foliage. 

Roger Dean, inner sleeve art for Yes, Close to the Edge (1972)

He returns repeatedly to islands of rock, with vegetation growing on them, that float impossibly through alien skies.

Dean, Green Parrot Island (2018)

Dean, Flights of Icarus (1977)

When James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) appeared, Dean was not alone in thinking that Cameron had plagiarised his art in the creation of his alien world Pandora. In fact Dean sued Cameron in 2013 for $50 million, though the US District Court dismissed the case (Dean continues to believe that the movie plagiarised his work: ‘I showed half a dozen different details that they copied specifically from it that didn't occur in nature,’ he later told CBS News. ‘But the judge, reverting to this idea that the work has to be taken as a whole and you don't go into detail, he took all my evidence out. Then when he came back to the concept that I'm saying they copied in detail things that they claimed I'd taken from nature, my evidence was gone.’ 

As a landscape artist, Dean is generally unangular, creating spacious open spaces that contain organic shapes, curves and lines-of-beauty, branching and bough-like formations of rock, or indeed of trees themselves, a dialled-down baroqueness of form. 

Dean, Freyja's Castle (1987)

Dean, The Hour of the Thin Ox (1987)

Dean's is an ecological aesthetic, a rendering of alien worlds and sometimes alien life as organicist wholeness.

Dean, Shadow of the Beast (1989)