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In Glenn Dean’s second solo show with Maxwell Alexander Gallery, the young Californian expands upon his repertoire by focussing a large portion of his current work on the figure. Of the more than two dozen pieces in the show “Landscapes of the American West,” more than a third feature peoples of the West – Native Americans, cowboys, and gauchos – interacting with the land that shaped them, as much, if not more than, they had shaped it. It is a departure for the young self-taught artist, but one that is a welcome addition to his award-winning landscapes: not only does it show that Dean does not suffer the shortcomings of the early American landscape painters of the East who could paint beautiful landscapes, but could not convincingly populate them, it shows that he is an artist who is willing to challenge himself (and succeed) – a sure sign of staying power in the art world.
“Landscapes of the American West” is currently on view at the Maxwell Alexander Gallery, and will run through the 17th of May. More information on the show can be found on the gallery’s website, or by contacting the gallery directly at 310.839.9242. Maxwell Alexander Gallery is located at 6144 West Washington Boulevard in Culver City, California, and is open daily, Wednesday through Saturday, 12:00 to 6:00 PM.
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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Jeffrey Carlson Reporting
Contributing Editor, Fine Art Today
Whether peaceful scenes of arid deserts or energetic compositions with waves crashing on the coastline, Glenn Dean’s paintings of the American West capture the beauty and meaning in simplicity.
The new Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Culver City, California, hosts a solo exhibition of landscapes by native Californian Glenn Dean. The exhibition, titled Glenn Dean: Landscapes of the American West, features 34 small- to medium-scale oil paintings and three intimate charcoal drawings. The artworks are displayed in unique wooden plank frames. Constructed by a Los Angeles furniture manufacturer, the frames serve to honor the arts and crafts movement of the early 1900s.
By their style and subject, Glenn Dean’s landscapes capture the aesthetic value and deep significance of that which is pure, simple, and essential. With his landscapes Dean aims to capture the spirituality with which nature is imbued. In this aspect Dean’s work recalls that of another American landscape artist, the great colorist George Inness. Dean writes of the natural landscape as a divine blessing, and he understands his role as a painter as memorializing that gift and thus giving honor back to the Creator.
Dean’s spiritual landscapes exude calm and sincerity. Brushstrokes are carefully placed and easily visible. Patches of harmonious color comprise these paintings: blues and grays for the skies and sea, reds and greens across the landscape. In Dean’s paintings one finds a profound appreciation for the wonders of nature and a refreshing openness in artistic expression.
Glenn Dean (b. 1976) credits the Early California and Western landscape painters of the early 1900s with helping him to find his own art form, in which he aims to create similarly interesting compositions with a sensitivity to the color of light. Dean’s art has been featured in numerous national magazines, including Western Art and Architecture, Southwest Art, Art of the West, and American Artist. He was the recipient of the first ever Emerging Artist Award presented by Art and Antiquesmagazine, and he was the recipient of the Grand Prize and Artists’ Choice awards at the inaugural Tucson/Sonoran Desert Museum Plein Air Invitational.
Glenn Dean: Landscapes of the American West debuts April 6, with an opening night reception from 7-10 p.m. The exhibition will run through May 4.
For more information, visit www.maxwellalexandergallery.com or e-mail inquiries to info@maxwellalexandergallery.com.
The arts and crafts movement that flourished around the turn of the the 20th century was known for its celebration of the craftsman/artist. Its influence can still be found today.
Glenn Dean has chosen frames that recall arts and crafts design for his show of small works at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Culver City, California. He admires their “simplicity and the honesty of their construction. When I approach the landscape, I try to simplify what I’m seeing. It’s a similar aesthetic.”
Dean paints in his studio from studies he has painted in the field. Although he has photographs for reference, he finds his studies are more accurate in terms of color and light.
“I’m attracted to different things in the landscape,” he says. “Sometimes it can seem chaotic and disorganized. I try to reduce the noise and look for nice color harmonies and positive and negative shapes playing off each other.”
Dean paints landscapes of the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lived for four years, to the coast of his native California. “I enjoy painting everything in the West from the desert to the mountains to the coast. There’s so much variety in those subjects.”
Tranquil Tide is a subtle coastal scene with soft light. “I try to pick different things in the landscape that provide new ideas and new challenges. The moods that occur along the coast with the moisture in the air and the interesting lighting effects are very poetic. The light in the desert is brighter and harsher, but it’s poetic too.”
Dean looks for the spiritual nature of a scene as well. When the artist captures the essence of a landscape, the painting can communicate at more than a visual level with the viewer. “The artists I’ve studied,” he explains, “have helped me see the landscape differently. I hope my paintings cause the viewer to pause the next time they’re in the landscape and see more of what is there.
In the upcoming group exhibit Still, Life, and Land, Maxwell Alexander Gallery will combine the talents of artists who create works all using a loose realistic style. All of the artists in the exhibit also make works of various subject matter—figures to still lifes to landscapes, hence the title of the exhibit. Artists participating include Sarah Freeman, Mark Daniel Nelson, Robert Lemler, Felicia Forte, David Shevlino, Eric Pedersen, and Joseph Todorovitch.
Several still lifes will be represented in the show such as Nelson’s painting Flower #4, a colorful bouquet against a black background; Freeman’s work Still Life with Pears with four pears in a simple color combination of grey, green and white; and Forte’s Painter’s Tape (Fern).
“Painter’s Tape (Fern) was first intended as a ‘portrait’ of a treasured object, created out of a desire to discover and share only that which is true and relevant to my own experience,” explains Forte. “The fern was a gift from a beloved sister and is therefore precious to me. I found the moth in my studio one morning after having recently read that moths have no mouths, instead eating their fill as caterpillars to fuel their later search for only love and death! Such romance had to be represented and remembered.”
Life can come in the form of figures such as Pedersen’s portrait titled Zero Nine Two One One Nine Eight Eight (2) that is part of a larger in-progress work featuring multiple portraits of the same size but with different colors. Also there is Shevlino’s work Arms Spread of a diver making her way toward the water.
Depictions of land are seen through Lemler’s painting Cress Street. “The stairs leading down to the beach at Cress Street in Laguna Beach, California, provided a unique perspective of the moment when a surfer enters the water,” says Lemler. “As a design, I have isolated the central subject of the surfer as the singular warm note in a very cool painting, creating a strong center of interest in a soft atmosphere.”
The show will run March 9 to April 2 with a reception on opening night from 7 to 10 p.m.
Opening tomorrow at the Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Culver City, California, is the new show “Still, Life, and Land,” featuring a diverse set of artworks from some of the gallery’s favorite artists.
More than 30 paintings have been curated into the show, with contributions coming from such artists as Sarah Freeman, Felicia Forte, Robert Lemler, Mark Daniel Nelson, Eric Pedersen, David Shevlino, and Joseph Todorovitch. Kicking off the show is an opening night gala from 7 – 10 PM on March 9th. For more information about the exhibition (and to see additional images), please contact Beau Alexander at (310) 839-9242, or visit the gallery’s website www.MaxwellAlexanderGallery.com.
Jeffrey Carlson Reporting
Contributing Editor, Fine Art Today
Maxwell Alexander Gallery, a new venue for art in Culver City, California, presents its second exhibition: Drawings and Works on Paper.
After a busy and successful inaugural show in December, Maxwell Alexander Gallery opened its doors for a second group show on February 9. Several artists represented in the opening exhibition appear again in the second, which features artworks in various media on paper.
The contemporary artists featured in Drawings and Works on Paper include Scott Burdick, Damian Chavez, Nicholas Coleman, Glenn Dean, Phil Epp, Logan Maxwell Hagege, Jefferson Hayman, Jeremy Lipking, Susan Lyon, Emil Joseph Robinson, Alexey Steele, Joseph Todorovitch, Leonardo Villasenor, and Vincent Xeus. Historic works by Will Shuster and Maynard Dixon are also included. Exhibited works are available for sale and moderately priced.
While all of the art on display might be included under the category of realism, it is the diversity of the available works that is most striking. Drawings and Works on Paper offers a range of styles and sensibilities that, together, purposely presses and confuses the limits of representational art.
Maxwell Alexander Gallery seeks to establish itself as a prominent new art space in California, where local artists working in diverse styles can cooperate to form unique and exciting exhibitions. While the majority of the pieces presented are figural works, even these display varied approaches. Damian Chavez infuses his works with shocks of unexpected color, and in so doing, demonstrates an affinity for painting both pattern and psychology that is reminiscent of Klimt. Logan Maxwell Hagege creates images of Native Americans that are both iconic and sensitive. Alongside enigmatic and evocative prints by Jefferson Hayman are charcoals and pastels by some of the finest figural artists working today, forming an eclectic and intriguing mix.
Drawings and Works on Paper opened February 9 and will be on view through March 5.
Maxwell Alexander Gallery is located at 6144 Washington Boulevard, in Culver City, California, 90232. For more information on the exhibition and artwork inquiries, contact the gallery at info@maxwellalexandergallery.com.
California’s young, and very promising, Maxwell Alexander Gallery will celebrate the art of drawing with an exhibition opening later this week. This new show Drawing and Works on Paper features approximately two dozen drawings, pastels, and etchings from many of today’s top artists including Scott Burdick, Damian Chavez, Nicholas Coleman, Glenn Dean, Phil Epp, Logan Maxwell Hagege, Jefferson Hayman, Jeremy Lipking, Susan Lyon, Emil Joseph Robinson, Alexey Steele, Joseph Todorovitch, Leonardo Villasenor, and Vincent Xeus. Also included in the show are several historic works by artists Will Shuster and Maynard Dixon.
Drawing and Works on Paper opens this Saturday, February 9th, with an artists’ reception from 7:00 to 10:00 PM. All are invited to come out and see these works in person.
The Maxwell Alexander Gallery is located at 6144 Washington Boulevard, in Culver City, California, 90232. For more information about the exhibition, please contact Beau Alexander (310) 839-9242, or visit www.maxwellalexandergallery.com/exhibition/grand-opening/drawings-and-works-on-paper/
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The new Culver City, California- based Maxwell Alexander Gallery will follow up its grand opening exhibit with a showing of approximately 25 works on paper ranging from etchings to drawings to pastels. Among the artists participating in the show are Scott Burdick, Phil Epp, Jeremy Lipking, Glenn Dean, Logan Maxwell Hagege, and Emil Joseph Robinson. Also available will be historic works by Maynard Dixon, Will Shuster, and others.
Of his charcoal on paper work Tanzanian Market, Burdick explains, “My wife, Susan Lyon, had volunteered in a school the previous year and we went back the next year for a painting trip. We were walking through the market near the town where she’d taught English classes when we heard a little boy shouting ‘Miss Susan, Miss Susan.’ One of the boys that had been in Susan’s class last year ran up and took us over to meet his mother, who had come to the market to sell chickens. The woman in this drawing is one of a large group of women who had traveled to the market to sell their chickens.”
Valley Riders, Dean’s preliminary drawing for a larger painting, will appear in the exhibit. “I’m attracted to the big, simple and sculptural shapes this view has,” he explains of the work. “I try to fill the canvas with one or two big shapes for an effect of heavy mass and scale. This was from a trip to Monument Valley last summer.”
The exhibition opens February 9 with a reception from 7 to 10 p.m. and runs through March 9.
Maxwell Alexander Gallery
6144 Washington Boulevard Culver City, CA 90232
(310) 839-9242 www.maxwellalexandergallery.com
Located in Culver City, in the middle of the thriving arts district, Maxwell Alexander Gallery brings a variety of quality Western and contemporary art to the Los Angeles area. With a goal to bring the best Western art to Los Angeles, Maxwell Alexander proudly represents artists such as Glenn Dean, Logan Maxwell Hagege, Jeremy Lipking, and Billy Schenck.
The styles of artwork that can be found in the gallery vary from Dean’s California impressionism to Schenck’s Western pop to Lipking’s naturalistic take on the West to Hagege’s bold interpretations of Western landscapes and the Native peoples of the West.
A group show opening February 9 features 15 artists including Lipking, Dean, Schenck, Hagege, and Phil Epp. An additional solo show featuring Dean’s work is set to open on April 6. Small works, set in craftsman-style frames will highlight “The Desert Southwest,” “The California Landscape,” and “The Seascape.”
On May 11, Schenck’s work, characterized by its unique, Western pop in a “paint-by- numbers” style, will appear. This legendary artist made a splash in the 1970s and ’80s with his bold energetic work, and has recently made a strong return to the contemporary Western art scene with fresh new works.
Promising Start for a New Art Space
Jeffrey Carlson Reporting
Contributing Editor, Fine Art Today
The Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Culver City, California, staged its Grand Opening in mid-December with a powerful show of contemporary realist and Western art.
December 15 saw a busy opening night for the Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Culver City, California. Founded by Beau Alexander, the gallery aspires to offer new representation for California artists and to provide an innovative context for viewing their artwork. Alexander explains, “We are putting a gallery together that is based on curated shows rather than representing a long roster of artists. Our goal is to build lasting relationships with our clients and give the support that the artists we are working with deserve.” Incorporating museum-style curating techniques into a group gallery exhibition may set this new art space apart and help to fix what often feels disjointed about group shows. The Grand Opening event provided an intriguing example of just how curated shows at Maxwell Alexander Gallery will look.
The Grand Opening included works by Kim Cogan, Glenn Dean, Josh Elliott, Logan Maxwell Hagege, Jefferson Hayman, Ignat Ignatov, David Kassan, Robert Lemler, Jeremy Lipking, Mark D. Nelson, Sergio Sanchez, Billy Schenck, and Joseph Todorovitch. From Cogan’s memento mori still lifes to the contemplative figural works of Lipking and Todorovitch and the Southwestern imagery of Nelson, Schenck, and Maxwell, the Grand Opening represented a wide array of styles. The show proved a successful and promising beginning. Several sales were recorded before the opening itself, which received about 400 visitors. Thirty minutes into the show, the gallery was at maximum capacity, and from 7:30-10 p.m. visitors could expect to wait 45 minutes for entrance.
For more information and the full catalogue, visit http://www.maxwellalexandergallery.com/exhibition/grand-opening/.
This video of Maxwell Alexander Gallery’s “grand opening” show was produced by ArtNoiseLA.
Celebrating their Grand Opening this weekend is the Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Culver City, California. This new showplace, founded by Beau Alexander, aims to introduce a new breed of gallery, and to fill a gap in the artists represented in the Los Angeles area. “There are many great galleries in Los Angeles and especially here in Culver City,” said Beau Alexander. “But there are many talented artists whose work is just not available in the Los Angeles area. We are putting a gallery together that is based on curated shows rather than representing a long roster of artists. Our goal is to build lasting relationships with our clients and give the support that the artists we are working with deserve.” The grand opening exhibition features new and moderately priced paintings by 13 artists including: Jeremy Lipking, Kim Cogan, David Kassan, Bill Schenck, Joseph Todorovitch, Glenn Dean, Jefferson Hayman, Mark D. Nelson, and Logan Maxwell Hagege.
Upcoming exhibits in the 2013 schedule will include a show of contemporary Western Art, a category of prime importance to the gallery. “We want to show that there is quality in every genre of art, be it Western, or traditional realism,” says Alexander. “There seems to be some prejudice on both coasts against Western art but we feel it needs to be looked at simply as American Art. Collectors shouldn’t be worried about it matching the style of their homes; certain pieces have a modern feel and can fit into any art collection. It won’t be what people are used to thinking of when it comes to Western Art.”
The Maxwell Alexander Gallery is located at 6144 W. Washington Boulevard, in Culver City, California, 90232. For more information about the gallery, or about the Grand Opening exhibition specifically, please contact Beau Alexander (310) 839-9242, or visit www.maxwellalexandergallery.com/exhibition/grand-opening/
