Glenn Dean aligns with elemental nature and a simpler, bygone time

By Gussie Fauntleroy

There’s something very interesting about being on the edge of a continent, where the straight line of the horizon dividing endless ocean and equally endless sky can make a person feel small. Glenn Dean, who grew up in Southern California, muses about this as he sits in his home two blocks from the Pacific near the Central Coast town of Cambria. It reminds him of other juxtapositions of scale between humans and the western landscape. “I’m always attracted to lonely horizon lines in the desert or prairie—that feeling of open space. Your mind needs that space, so I try to create that in my work,” he says.

Spending time in vast, unpeopled expanses of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, and along the rocky California coast, is essential to the creative process for Dean. He needs to be out there making oil sketches, shooting photographs for reference, or just hiking and absorbing the ever-changing moods of land, sky, and sea. “Whether I’m painting or hiking or taking photos, it’s all going into the information vault,” he says. Back in his no-frills studio on the top floor of a small building in Cambria, he dips into that vault to produce his award-winning works, setting up field studies near his easel as reminders of the color palette and light of a particular place and time of day.

But his most important reference materials are memories of being there, he says. IN THE MIDDAY SUN, for example, takes him back to the hard-squinting feeling of almost blinding light in open country when the summer sun is directly overhead with no shade. In the painting, one of the riders gazes toward a distant stand of trees, perhaps at the ranch that he and his companion call home. For Dean, this feeling of being immersed in elemental nature emerges from a deep connection with the land. It also has an equivalent in the humbling expanse and wildness of the sea.

“My former life was in the ocean,” the 44-year-old artist says, smiling. Raised in Torrance, near Redondo Beach, he’s referring to a passion for bodyboard surfing that used to occupy much of his time. By his late teens he was traveling for competitions, and he briefly turned professional in his early 20s. Yet even while much of his interest and effort at the time centered around the sport, art was making its way to the forefront of his dreams. It had been there on the periphery for a while.

Dean’s parents were both psychologists and his mother, although not a professional artist, enjoyed painting on the side. As a boy Glenn watched her at her easel, but she waited for him to express an interest before offering to help him get started. Then, when he was about 12, he told her he’d like to try. “She said, Here you go, and set out all the materials for me.” With a young teen’s need for autonomy, he didn’t want any instruction or advice. His first painting, an ocean wave, was also his first art sale—his grandfather bought it for the exhilarating price of $30.

For the next few years he drew and painted subjects that tend to intrigue adolescents, including Martians and other odd creatures. But in high school he also had a couple of friends who were interested in art. One was the son of contemporary painter Dan McCaw. “That was important because I saw the possibility of making a living as an artist,” Dean says. “It planted the seed.”

The seed began growing not long after his parents moved to Arizona but allowed 17-year-old Glenn to remain in California (living with a friend’s family) to pursue bodyboarding. During one of his early visits to Arizona, he and his mother carried easels into the desert—his first attempt at painting the landscape on location. “That was a turning point. It was when I realized that I wanted to be an artist and it was time to start taking it more seriously,” he says. “The painting was awful, but the experience lit a fire in me. I needed to find out how to get better results.”

Back home, the young artist had his next major revelation, encountering for the first time the paintings of early California Impressionists. “It blew me away, discovering artists that were so beautifully painting the landscape I was familiar with. I wondered how they could create such subtle effects by using paint so boldly,” he says. He sought out and studied their art at the Irvine Museum and in Laguna Beach galleries. And he briefly considered pursuing formal art education but was uninspired by the art schools on his radar.

Instead, he bought books and started putting in hours at the easel on his own. He also took part in short workshops with painters Matt Smith and the late Ken Auster. While these were very helpful, he found himself tending to emulate each teacher’s style. He needed to step away and find his own approach. “Early on you don’t know what your own vision is, so you just have to follow what feels right along the way,” he says. “Over the years I’ve realized that working in solitude has been valuable for me. It’s where I can evaluate what is happening in my work and try to make corrections where they’re needed. Maybe it’s a byproduct of not having formal training—I don’t have a teacher’s voice in my head when I work, it’s really just my own. So I have to be honest with myself.”

As he refined his skills and painting style to reflect an authentic vision, Dean made his home for a time on the Central Coast. In the mid-2000s he spent almost four years in Santa Fe, where he found enormous inspiration in New Mexico’s rich history and blend of cultures, as well as the work of the Taos Society painters. When he settled back in the Cambria area, friends told him his palette had become brighter as a result of living and painting in the high-desert Southwest, although the change was less apparent to the artist himself. What he did notice was an increasing interest in incorporating figures in his work, initially as small, distant points of humanity within the landscape.

By 2014 the figures had begun moving closer to the front of the canvas, gaining prominence. As they did, they offered the suggestion of stories, but Dean intentionally leaves them vague to allow room for the viewer’s imagination. In one recent piece, a pioneer woman whose stance suggests maturity and motherhood stands behind a boy sitting reflectively on a large rock. Is she making room in her mind for his future as he dreams of the distant mountains—just as Dean’s own mother stood back in trust and gave him the freedom to find his own path in life? “A big part of it, for me, is imagining myself as the subject in the painting,” he says. “Ultimately that’s what makes it seem more believable, painting as if it’s a memory of a real experience I’ve had.”

Other paintings depict young couples on horseback in open sagebrush country, reflecting another trend Dean noticed in his art soon after he married almost five years ago: Set within western landscapes of an earlier era, female figures appear alongside men in what feel like respectful, equal roles. One reason for this, he says, is a desire to offset what he sees as too few females as subjects in western art, especially depicted on par with men. “The simple fact is that women make things happen; they were doing a lot of the work,” he says. Aside from that, he adds, “a woman next to a man gives a level of honesty to the man—he’s not an outlaw, but perhaps a well-rounded man if he has a good woman by his side.”

Dean returns frequently to many of his favorite places in the Southwest and along the lonelier parts of the California coast, each time adding to his sizable collection of reference materials. But rather than focus on a consecutive series of paintings featuring the same landscape, he mixes it up. “I like to jump around and challenge myself from one painting to the next. Then I can come back to a subject and be fresher and have new ideas,” he says. Yet regardless of the setting or the story he has in mind, much of his art conveys a sense of timelessness and ordinary simplicity that aligns with his personal temperament and visual aesthetic. “It’s not any particular moment in history, it’s more the idea of a bygone era,” he says, noting that he has never been drawn to dramatic action in his imaginings of early western life. “When I’m in nature I enjoy the spirit of solitude and tranquility, so I’m attracted to subjects that carry that spirit.”

representation
Maxwell Alexander Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ; The Legacy Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; www.landscapesofthewest.com.

This story appeared in the March/April 2021 issue of Southwest Art magazine.