Roger Dean

Roger Dean: The Landscape Painter Who Sold Millions

Somewhere between London and Brighton, on a train, a young designer began pushing three letters around a sheet of paper to see whether they could be made to interlock. The result — the swelling, bulbous word YES — became one of the first deliberately designed logos any major rock band had owned, at a moment when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones still had none. Roger Dean has been paid the strange compliment ever since of having his name used as an adjective. A floating island trailing roots over an empty sea is a Roger Dean, whoever painted it.

An Army Childhood in Strange Places

Dean was born on 31 August 1944 in Ashford, Kent, and spent a childhood dragged around the world by his father's military postings — Greece, Cyprus, Hong Kong. It gave him the raw material he has been mining ever since. He climbed Lion Rock in Hong Kong as a boy and later walked the countryside of Scotland and Wales; the effect, he says, was permanent. "I just loved pathways and landscapes. It was burned into my soul, if you like."

He studied at Canterbury College of Art and then at the Royal College of Art in London, finishing in 1968, where he worked on furniture design under Professor David Pye. Seven years of art school, by his own account, went into learning draughtsmanship — a skill he regards as non-negotiable and thinks art education has abandoned. "If people want to play a musical instrument, they are taught about the instrument and how to play it properly," he has said. "The same doesn't go in art school."

The Chair Before the Album Covers

His first significant object was not a picture. The Sea Urchin chair of 1967 — a seat designed to conform completely to the shape of whoever sat in it, anticipating the beanbag — is now in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Around the same period Ronnie Scott commissioned him to paint a mural in the jazz club that bears his name.

Dean has never accepted that these were different jobs. "I never really got why they were separate skills," he has said. "I could paint like any painter, I could design like any designer; I could design graphics, I could design architecture, I could design furniture... because to me they were all one thing and something I absolutely loved."

Woyaya, and Then Yes

The breakthrough was Osibisa's *Woyaya* in 1971, with its airborne elephant. "From that point on I could do what I wanted," Dean said. The head of Atlantic Records in Europe promised to call when a band needed a cover, and the band was Yes.

The first was *Fragile*. Dean's account of it is a small lesson in how he works. "The idea was to put a 'fragile' label on the album cover. I didn't want to do anything so literal. I wanted to take the idea of fragility and wrap it round the world." What made the relationship function was an absence of supervision: "There was no art director involved and they trusted that I knew what I was doing." Steve Howe, the band's guitarist, has confirmed the arrangement from the other side — Dean "has complete freedom to come up with whatever captures his imagination... he goes off and we don't really have any idea what he's going to come back with."

Building Worlds That Hold Up

*Close to the Edge* followed in 1973, and Dean's description of the aim is unusually precise: "a world that was magical, miniature and like a bonsai – seemingly impossible but totally credible to the eye." The second half of that sentence is the whole technique. "I was painting landscapes to look real, and in the most literal sense of the word, enticing. I wanted them to pull you in and make you imagine what it would be like getting on a boat to that island." The inner painting drew on the Scottish Highlands and the Lake District. The fantasy works because the geology does not cheat.

*Tales from Topographic Oceans*, the same year, came out of a conversation on a flight in which Jon Anderson explained that the record concerned patterns in the landscape — "Topography is about maps: a topographic view of the landscape" — an idea Dean pursued via John Michell's *The View Over Atlantis*. *Relayer* in 1974 was, he recalls, "a lot of very precise drawing. It's so minimalist in colour, with just the faintest water-colour tints – but it's not minimalist in ideas."

He is disarmingly blunt about how little of the supposed symbolism is actually there. People have told him they can find members of the band hidden in his rocks. Asked once about the symbolism in his work, he replied that it isn't there, and that the questioner was imagining it. Of the process itself he offers something closer to mysticism: "It's almost like automatic writing: you're the tool of another power."

Beyond the Sleeve

Dean designed the Virgin Records logo in 1972 and visual identities for Asia, Uriah Heep and many others. He moved into video games, producing art for Psygnosis titles and redesigning the Tetris logo. He works slowly, completing roughly four paintings a year. In 2013 he sued James Cameron for $50 million, alleging that fourteen of his images had been plagiarised in *Avatar*; the judge dismissed the case, though the film's makers had acknowledged his influence.

Why Roger Is Called a Genius

The quality on offer here is not conceptual originality of the kind claimed for a physicist or a novelist. It is world-building consistency executed at an extremely high level of draughtsmanship — the ability to invent an environment that has never existed and render it with enough structural and atmospheric plausibility that the eye accepts it as a place rather than a picture. Dean's floating rocks obey a logic; light falls on them correctly; distance recedes properly. Getting the impossible to look surveyed is a technical problem, and he solved it early and repeatedly. The second, rarer quality is his refusal of specialisation. A man who designs a chair now in the V&A, a corporate logo, a jazz-club mural and a hundred paintings, insisting they are one activity, is exercising a genuinely unusual breadth.

The counter-case should not be soft-pedalled. This is commercial illustration made to a brief, and the critical establishment has never taken the progressive-rock visual idiom seriously, regarding it as decorative, adolescent and repetitive — a charge with some force, since Dean has been painting recognisably the same world for fifty years. He himself denies the depth others project onto it. He lost the *Avatar* case. And the claim rests on skill of hand and eye rather than on intellect; that is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up. What is not in dispute is that he built a private visual language so coherent that other people's work gets attributed to him by mistake, which is a form of authorship most artists never reach.

Legacy

Dean is elegiac about the format that made him. "It was a very, very brief period in history when the album cover art and the music came together to make something that was the perfect gift." That window closed with vinyl. What survives is odder and more durable: a landscape that exists nowhere, which several generations can nonetheless picture exactly.

Achievements

• Educated at The Norton Knatchbull School, Kent Institute of Art & Design and Royal College of Art
• Worked as illustrator, architect and designer