First Figurative Paintings for Western Artist Glenn Dean

Jeffrey Carlson Reporting

Editor, Fine Art Today

Widely respected for his landscapes depicting the American West, Glenn Dean forays into the figurative world with his most recent body of work.Glenn Dean is displaying new works in his second solo show with Maxwell Alexander Gallery, on view through May 17. “Landscapes of the American West” does, indeed, feature Dean’s signature subject matter, but it also includes a group of figurative paintings that portray cowboys in their terrain.

Dean’s figurative paintings represent a new direction for the artist — one that has already proven successful. The artist’s painting “Descending Cowboy” appeared at the Scottsdale Art Auction earlier this month and doubled its high-end estimate, selling for $25,875, and setting an auction record for the artist in the process. At the time of writing, six of Dean’s paintings in “Landscapes of the American West” that feature figures have already sold.

When situated in the landscape, Dean’s cowboys and their mounts seem a natural continuation of the desert plains that have been the artist’s primary subject. Dean has also painted a number of works where they dominate the composition, leaving the eye nowhere else to go, and demonstrating no tentativeness in his approach to the figure. In these paintings, a loose brush, the sidelong glances of the subjects, and the elusiveness of their features contribute to an attractive, mysterious sense of distance that is a defining characteristic of the Western ethos.

The present exhibition also displays a series of verdant green landscapes and coastal scenes, in which the artist’s economy of means is powerfully present.

Glenn Dean will be featured in the June-July issue of PleinAir magazine. To see more from Dean’s “Landscapes of the American West,” visit MaxwellAlexanderGallery.com.

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