STRATA— Peter
Frank, Art Critic
"In her Strata series
Dean Andrews would seem to be looking heavenward, or even borne aloft. Her
renditions
of clouds, as rich,
aqueous, and natural-seeming as those found in Constable or Tiepolo, celebrate
one of the world’s most evocative phenomena.
But, like any good cloud painter, Andrews is not just emulating the lofty fulminations
of weather and atmosphere, she is capturing, reconsidering, and reinventing a
visual space that has captivated humankind’s senses since our species began
to reason.
Clouds, fugitive things, are among the most painterly phenomena in nature. They
are nothing but brushstrokes. Especially when depicted on the scale Andrews has
chosen for them here, they can disappear into abstraction, as tenuous in their
presence as Turner’s fires or Monet’s water lilies.
This is what fascinates Andrews, a painter who favors the abstract but favors
it for its ability
to distill the essence of the world as we feel and see it.
Andrews does not invent her paintings so much as derive them from what she and
we already know with our eyes and hands. In making that derivation, however,
she paints in order to make
us question what we thus know, and her clouds – miniature excerpts of vast
skies, palpable but pocket-size cloud-things much more substantive but much less “real” than
photographs of the same subjects – upend everything we know about the physical
actuality of clouds at the same time they reify how we see them. Andrews’ clouds
aren’t there, but they have been."
