Glenn Dean
GLENN DEAN TENDS TO LET HIS PAINTINGS do the talking. Even then, the silence is audible. Steeped in the solitude of nature, his canvases invite meditation — on color, light, mesas, mountains, sagebrush, clouds. A horse, a cowboy, the moon, the frontier.
The secret to a great photograph might be equal parts composition and capturing the decisive moment. Dean composes decisive moments in paint, evoking in brushstrokes an ambience that transports the viewer into not just the moment but into the romance of the West.
Painting solitary landscapes and quiet moments, Dean lives on the Central Coast of his native California. He also lived in New Mexico for nearly four years. And his paintings seek to share the beauty of those places and the larger West.
“I paint because for me, it’s the most effective way to celebrate or honor the things in the world that I find to be beautiful,” he says. Desert, mountains, mesas, coasts — he’s hard-pressed to choose a favorite landscape in the West. “They are clearly all so different and beautiful. I am from the coast and my life now is on the coast. There’s something about being on the edge of a continent with the vast surface of a hidden world to look out on. It keeps the imagination alive.
Witnessing nature’s moods on the water is pretty amazing, too. And
