VISIONS Art Quarterly
Summer 1995

DEAN ANDREWS' Strata at FIG Gallery
Santa Monica, California
By Jan Butterfield, Art Critic and Author of The Art of Light and Space

“ Sunrays strike through veils of misty dews...
How luminous the land that haze enshrouds
Struck by the blaze that falls through gathering clouds!”
— Charles Baudelaire, Gathering Clouds

Dean Andrews’ new translucent skyworks on plexiglass, recently shown at FIG Gallery in Santa Monica are diminutive, ranging in size from 4 inches by 4 inches to 8 inches by 14 inches. These are a radical contrast to her previous site-specific work, “Atmospheres,” which incorporated canvases as large as 86 inches by 204 inches filling an entire room.

These exquisite works are not representational. They are not so much depictions of clouds or of summer or winter skys; they are, rather, images of infinity--tinted with color--glimpsed briefly, as out a window.

Of all the images at an artist’s disposal, none ride the tightrope between realism and abstraction as does the sky in its infinite intricateness. Few paint it well. One of those artists is Dean Andrews.

One of the more exciting and rewarding things in this complex art world is to witness the development which occurs when the sparks which jump from one artist to another spawn a whole new generation of legitimate inheritors. The newest works of Dean Andrews--the cloud and sky works--do just that.
Fleshing out a tradition begun in the 1960’s by Joe Goode, Andrews’ cloud works are clearly influenced by “Light and Space.” More specifically, they also fit even more comfortably into the sub-category, dubbed, somewhat prosaically “California Glass and Plastic,” which came to the fore in Southern California in the late sixties.

The effect of California as a place has had a great influence on works of “Light and Space.” The sunny skies, sparkling water and soft sand are as much a part of the feeling of this place as the subways, skyscrapers and gridded streets are of Manhattan.

To live in California is to be continually conscious of the curiously softened color and of space. The quality of light is striking. Even the smog has its positive attributes: the striations of soft yellows and lavender in the inversion layers are almost more spectacular than any clear-sky effects ever seen there. When the noise and traffic become unbearable, there is always the desert--whose vast stretches calm, reassure and restore.

The difference between East Coast artists and West Coast artists became patently clear at this point in time. East Coast artists wanted the object and the material to be separable, whereas those on the West Coast sought to make the statement separate from an object; they wanted to suggest the ripple of the sunlight, the flicker of light through the trees, a smooth spill of moonlight. As the critic Melinda Wortz put it: “The illusions found in these Southern California works--of solid forms, dissolving through reflected or projected light...resulted from an interaction between the ambient light and the objects themselves. In other words, these works incorporate the light and space of the place they are in, rather than painting the illusion of colored light on canvas.”

The transparency and seeming immateriality of glass and plastic made them ideal for concerns with light, space and color. The works created in that tradition, though still object-oriented, became very experiential, particularly as successive refinements started to take place.

With the widespread involvement with “Glass and Plastic” the boundaries between painting and sculpture began to dissolve. Dean Andrews’ works are superb examples of works which have learned their lessons from “Light and Space” and “California Glass and Plastic,” and have gone on to make a very real contribution to the establishment of an art form that is neither painting or sculpture per se but a highly successful amalgamation of them both.