William Roger Dean (born 31 August 1944) is an English artist, designer, and publisher. He began painting posters and album covers for musicians in the late 1960s. The groups for whom he did the most art are the English rock bands Yes and Asia.
The covers often feature exotic fantasy landscapes. His work has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.
Early life
William Roger Dean was born on 31 August 1944 in Ashford, Kent.[1] His mother studied dress design at Canterbury School of Art before her marriage and his father was an engineer in the British Army. He has three siblings, brother Martyn and sisters Penny and Philippa. Much of Dean's childhood was spent in Greece, Cyprus, and, from age 12 to 15, Hong Kong, so his father could carry out army duties.[1] Dean was very keen on natural history as a child, and Chinese landscape art and feng shui became particular influences on him during his time in Hong Kong.[2] He has cited landscape, "and the pathways through it", as his greatest influence and source of inspiration.[3]
In 1959, after the family had returned to England, Dean attended Ashford Grammar School followed by his entry in 1961 to the Canterbury College of Art studying silversmithing and furniture design and graduated with a National Diploma in Design.[1] He was removed from a life drawing class by the principal for being "young and impressionable", and was informed he could not take it due to maths and physics being his other subjects, leading a switch to studying industrial design. As the school was trying to become accredited in the subject, Dean bypassed its foundation level course but disliked the way the subject was taught and questioned the teachers as to why people had to live in "boxes" and their response in that "form follows function".[4][5]
Towards the end of the course at Canterbury, Dean was faced with the option of pursuing either architecture or industrial design; one of his tutors thought neither were for him, and recommended that Dean study at the Royal College of Art in London. He enrolled at the college in 1965 to study furniture design and became a student of Professor David Pye.[4][1] Among his research was the "psychology of architecture" and what made people feel comfortable in buildings.[4] He did a thesis about "producing a sense of tranquillity in domestic architecture".[3] He graduated from the college in 1968 with a masters first degree honours, and won a silver medal for "work of special distinction".[6] By this time, Dean was interested in "designing the future [...] boxes for people to live in".[2][7] He considered Rick Griffin's artwork for Aoxomoxoa (1969) by the Grateful Dead as his "first big visual shock" and bought the album prior to owning a record player.[3]
Career
1960s
Among Dean's first successes was his sea urchin chair design which spawned from his research at the Royal College and completed in 1967.[4] He filed a patent for it in the following year. It has been considered to be a predecessor to the bean bag, whereby the chair compresses and fully adapts to the shape and size of the user.[2][8] The design was completed when Dean was one of the few students picked from the Royal College to design and make objects in famed designer Cherrill Scheer's factory. The chair remains one of Scheer's favourite pieces. It is now a part of the permanent collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum.[2]
In 1968, during his third year at the Royal College, Dean was assigned a project which involved the design of a contemporary landscape seating area of the upstairs disco at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Soho. This led to the design of his first album cover, Gun (1968) by rock band The Gun, after owner Ronnie Scott and business partner Jimmy Parsons asked him to use a demonic-themed design that Dean originally made in his sketchbook for his thesis, for the album's cover.[4][1][7][3] Dean revisited the original design and was paid around £5,000 for his work,[5] which was more than he had earned with architecture, and with much less effort. He decided to venture into cover design not purely for the money, but its wider audience and its use "as a propaganda tool [...] showing people what might be and what could be".[3] Dean picked up work where he could, including covers for various jazz artists for Vertigo Records which he disliked, calling them "austere exercises" and too restrictive for the ideas he wished to convey.[3] The experience led Dean to establish a commission before starting work he wanted to do, leading to a short period of financial hardship.[3] At the same time he wanted to release a book on architecture, but faced rejection from 27 different publishers.[7][3]
1970s
Dean designed the logo to the independent label Fly Records in 1970. This led to a single for their musician Marc Bolan, which involved typesetting the liner notes and lyrics, but Dean had not performed typesetting before and completed the inserts by hand with the assistance of a graphic designer, in order to show the printing staff where the text was to be placed. The positive reaction Dean received from his style of writing led to him handwriting the text for further Bolan singles.[4] This was a similar case for Dean's design for Clear Blue Sky (1970) by Clear Blue Sky, where a painting had been completed except the typesetting, "So to bluff my way through the meeting I had to handwrite it all and hope they would never ask about it".[9] The label's staffers were enthusiastic, which gave Dean the confidence to pursue more handwriting, logo, and graphic work.[9]
By 1971, Dean's desire to produce artwork for rock bands had grown though he continued to pursue architecture and headed a small exhibition of his work in Florence.[6] Following discussions with A&R man David Howells, who had assigned Dean the sleeve for The Gun, Dean agreed to work on the cover of Osibisa (1971) by Afro-rock band Osibisa. The design is a result of a brief that Dean described as "credible African fairytale imagery" and features "flying elephants and not architecture", which became an early representation of the style he later achieved fame with.[2] Dean considered the job a breakthrough for his career as the design was made into a poster by the Big 'O' poster company which sold a large number of copies.[2] He later said, "From that point on I could do what I wanted".[3]
In mid-1971, during his search for work affiliated with rock bands, Dean sent a portfolio to numerous executives including Phil Carson, the European General Manager of Atlantic Records. Carson took an interest in using Dean for one of his rock acts, Yes, and hired Dean for the cover of Yes's fourth album, Fragile (1971), which marked the beginning of an association with the band to the present day.[2] Dean pitched a story on a creation myth rather than a particular image for it, "about a child who dreamt they were living on a planet that was breaking up, so they had to build a space ark to find another planet to live on. And they towed all the little bits of the planet with them".[2] In 1972, he designed the band's logo while travelling on the Brighton Belle train, which has been used on most of their albums since Close to the Edge (1972).[2] In addition to their covers, Dean and his brother Martyn worked on the stage design for Yes from 1973 to 1976, 1980, 1989, and 2004.[10] The tour for Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) featured a nationwide merchandising campaign including posters and t-shirts that led to the creation of the production company Brockum.[9]
In 1972, Dean designed the logo for Richard Branson's newly established Virgin Records label, following several labels and designs he produced for Branson's Virgin record shop in London, such as the carrier bags.[9][11] A photographic variation of Dean's Virgin logo was used for its subsidiary label, Caroline Records. In 1973, Vertigo Records changed the design of its record labels from a spiral pattern to a pictorial one by Dean that featured two spaceships.[11] While working on the art for Yessongs (1973), Dean and his printers Tinsley Robor secured a patent for "a way of going from gatefold to any number of pages, folded out of one piece of card".[3] In the late 1970s, Dean had an idea for Living in the Third Millennium, a thirteen episode television show about the designs and technological challenges of the future, yet it never made it to production due to budget constraints.[2]
1980s–present
In the 1980s, Dean's output focused on other areas, including stage design, architecture, and video game art. He was approached by Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis to design the costumes for Flash Gordon (1980), but declined as film work required him to relinquish the ownership of his designs.[11] In 1981, he collaborated with his brother Martyn on the Tectonic House, an environmentally-friendly and economic home that was displayed at the annual International Ideal Home Exhibition in Birmingham. The idea spawned from two ideas–Dean's earlier designs for a bedroom intended for the safety of children, and Martyn's "retreat pod" from 1970 that Stanley Kubrick borrowed for his film A Clockwork Orange (1971).[12] The project has developed into its current name, Home for Life, and the non-working prototype contains no straight edges or right angles. In the early 2000s, the cost to produce one was estimated to be $75,000–$80,000. Although several local British governments have expressed interest in the project, none have come into fruition.[13][14][7] In 2003, a project involving the construction of 264 villas, chalets, and apartments designed by Dean on a 65-acre site near Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire had entered the planning stage.[13]
In 1982, readers of Rolling Stone voted Dean's cover for Asia's debut studio album as the second greatest album cover of all time, behind Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) by the Beatles.[13] His logo for the band featured hard edges and sharp corners on purpose, as a contrast to the had produced for Yes.[11]
Dean's first design for a video game was The Black Onyx (1984), which was a collaboration with comic artist Michael Kaluta. It marked the beginning of a series of designs Dean produced for Henk Rogers, who designed the game. The project involved Dean and Kaluta producing an estimated 4,000 drawings for the game, including ideas for its animation, story, music, and motion capture.[3] Dean went on to produce the cover artwork for several Psygnosis games, including Obliterator (1988) and Shadow of the Beast (1989).[15] Dean redesigned the Tetris logo which led to the design of the cover art for Tetris Worlds (2001).[16]
Arches Mist from the Yes album Keys to Ascension (1996), is a characteristic Dean landscape, with fantasy inspired and natural features.
In 1996, Dean produced artwork for a poster distributed nationwide to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Starbucks.[17]
In 2013, Dean filed a $50 million lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in New York, alleging that director James Cameron had plagiarised 14 of his original images in the film Avatar (2009).[18] Although the filmmakers admitted to being influenced by his work, a judge dismissed the case.[19] Dean felt the judge failed to properly examine the evidence provided. "I showed half a dozen different details that they copied specifically from it that didn't occur in nature. But the judge, reverting to this idea that the work has to be taken as a whole and you don't go into detail, he took all my evidence out. Then when he came back to the concept that I'm saying they copied in detail things that they claimed I'd taken from nature, my evidence was gone."[11]
In March 2021, Dean released his first artwork on the digital art auction platform Nifty Gateway, featuring non-fungible token art pieces.[21] In 2022, an exhibition of works by Dean and his daughter Freyja was displayed at the Haight Street Art Center in San Francisco, entited The Secret Path.[11] Later in 2022, an immersive exhibition featuring Dean's artwork presented in high definition 4D audio and video with laser projections was held at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, also in San Francisco.[11]
Dean has two permanent galleries, his largest at Trading Boundaries, East Sussex in the UK and the other at The San Francisco Art Exchange. Both galleries display original works and limited edition prints, sketches and drawings.
Album covers
Known primarily for the dreamy, other-worldly scenes he has created for Yes, Asia, Budgie, Uriah Heep, Gentle Giant and other bands, Dean has described himself primarily as a landscape painter.[22] Characteristic landscapes show graceful stone arches (as shown in Arches Mist) or floating islands, while many paintings portray organic-seeming habitats, such as on the cover of Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe. Though he primarily works with watercolour paints, many of his paintings make use of multiple media, including gouache, ink, enamel, crayon and collage. In addition to his cover paintings, Dean is respected for his calligraphic work, designing logos and titles to go with his paintings.
Dean was friends with album cover designer Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis and the two lived in the same building after leaving university. He recalled a time when they collaborated on an album cover, but it turned out to be "a complete failure".[22] The rise of the compact disc in the 1980s led to what Dean described as a decline in combining music with art, with the jewel case looking "tacky" and a way for record companies sacrificing quality to save money.[23] He cites the early CD reissue of Close to the Edge by Yes as one that particularly affected him as his inner sleeve artwork was missing, replaced with black and white text.[22]
Personal life
Dean lives in Lewes, East Sussex.[2] He has a daughter, Freyja, who also an artist and designer and is the inspiration behind Dean's 1987 painting Freyja's Castle. The pair have collaborated on work, exhibitions and stage productions. She produced the cover art for Osibisa's album Osee Yee (2009).
Dean has had a long relationship with the Isle of Man, and especially with its long-term resident Rick Wakeman, keyboardist of Yes, for which Dean has designed several pieces of album artwork.[24]
The First Day Cover (FDC) was also issued in a limited 750-issue run which were signed by Dean (this cover was issued on 2 September 2016).
On 20 August 2016, an exhibition of Dean's masterpieces went on display at the Manx Museum.[25]
A special FDC was issued on 25 March 2018, to celebrate 50 years of Yes – this was a different cover to the August 2016 one, and was postmarked in Gold to record this historic event and signed personally by Dean who has created a special 50th Anniversary logo. A limited edition of 1000 signed covers were issued.
Dean's artwork was featured in a collaboration with Italian fashion house Valentino for their spring/summer 2020 men's collection.[26][27]
