DEAN DASS: Clouds, Flares and Fireflies

DEAN DASS “CLOUDS, FLARES, & FIREFILES”

Coming to Terms with Paul Klee Often, I find images to work with on sci-fi television, on my grandchildren’s video games and YouTube channels, and in my own photographs of horizons, night-time skies, and fires. For me drawing may be mostly a separate enterprise and relates to my painting especially in theme. To speak of line and color working together, however, recalls Paul Klee. Klee’s Fish Magic: that modest in size, most complex, bejeweled painting/collage that hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Let’s admire that painting for more than all the glowing, colored spots. In Klee’s painting we see the lower creatures, so-called, undivided, living and swimming freely in eternity, while we, literally in this painting, are caught on the edge. We look out in observation while simultaneously looking inward. Klee writes about this in detail both in his diaries and in his pedagogical writings: we are both conscious and self-conscious. Following Klee, it has always appealed to me to try to configure our condition.

But over the course of this Pandemic, I found myself saying Paul Klee and Ursula Le Guin in the same sentence. Le Guin was writing in a genre that is now called – not Science- but Speculative Fiction. Can’t we apply that same category to Klee’s work? In asking who we are, I believe Klee also asks where we are going. With Klee it is a question of longing. I want to join them both in this kind of speculation.

Yet somehow, after many years, re-reading Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest did not inspire me to paint a beautiful primordial earth. Just the opposite. Humans wearing protective headgear and images of spaceships crashing come readily to mind.

The light on the horizon is dim. It’s a probably a city in flames seen in low-resolution. From this distance it’s hard to tell anything. Those are not clouds of fireflies. We remember clouds of fireflies as children running through fields.

Our skies are filled with dissonance, discord, and conflict.

Dean A. Dass PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Library of Congress, Rare Book Division Brooklyn Museum of Art Charlotte Printmaker's Society North Carolina Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina Des Moines Art Center; Des Moines, Iowa Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas Free Library of Philadelphia George Mason University, Fenwick Library Iowa State University, Ames Jersey City Art Museum, New Jersey Jyväskylä Art Museum, Jyväskylä, Finland Louisiana State University, Rare Book Library, Baton Rouge Louisiana State University, Hilliard University Art Museum National Collection of Poland, Kraków Nicholls State University, Rare Book Library North Carolina Print & Drawing Society, Charlotte Ohio State University, Rare Book Library Philadelphia Museum of Art School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, W. Van Allen Clark Library State of Iowa, Herbert Hoover Building, Des Moines Southern Graphics Council Temple University, Philadelphia

University of Dallas, Irving University of California, Santa Barbara, Rare Book Library University of Central Florida, Rare Book Library University of Colorado, Boulder, Rare Book Library University of Denver, Special Collections Library University of Iowa, Special Collections Library University of Kansas, Lawrence University of Nebraska, Kearney University of Nebraska, Lincoln University of North Carolina, Greensboro, Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls University of South Dakota, Vermillion University of Southern Indiana University of Tennessee, John C. Hodges Special Collections Library University of Virginia, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library University of Virginia, Fralin Art Museum University of Virginia Hospitals, Charlottesville University of Wyoming Art Museum, Laramie Virginia Commission for the Arts, Richmond Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Zuckerman Museum, Kennesaw State University

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