Dean Dass: New Paintings and Works on Paper

Dean Dass is a Professor of Printmaking at the University of Virginia and his work, which often involves his pioneering use of the ink jet printer and an alchemical merging of materials such as mica and gold leaf with pigment and paper or linen, is in collections all over the world, from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to the National Gallery in Krakow Poland and the Alvar Aalto Museum in Finland. His award-winning hand made books have been collected by the Rare Books division of the Library of Congress, and his magisterial oil paintings reside in many prestigious public and private collections. Dass often exhibits in Scandinavia and has an abiding interest in northern landscapes, light, and art. This exhibition will highlight Dass’s latest sublime land and seascapes, some based on his travel to the Lapland, 515 miles north of Helsinki as well as the southwest coast of Ireland in Kerry County where he spent time in 2011 and closer to home, ponds and rivers of our central Virginia and his own back yard. (Allendale Pond). If these ethereal oil paintings bring to mind the Romantic tradition of the Sublime in their shimmering transparent surfaces, his Clouds, which are created with inks, pigments, kaolin and marble dust on paper mounted on board are paradoxically more mineral and sometimes earthy in their expression. The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday 1 - 5 and by appointment.