Cover - Viva Lewes

a r t a n d a r C h i t E C t u r E
Photograph: Alex Leith
surreality
Bites
Roger Dean turns his endlessly inventive imagination towards th
The phantasmagorical album cover designs for Yes
albums such as Close to the Edge and Tales from
Topographic Oceans were among the most iconic
symbols of the 1970s. Their creator, Roger Dean,
lives in Lewes, where he continues to work as an
artist, designer, and, more recently, architect. There
will be an exhibition of his remarkable designs in
the Old Market Lane Garage this month, which will
show that his fertile, otherworldly imagination has
remained productive in the intervening years.
I visit Roger, and his enormous German Shepherd,
Calvin, one warm July morning, to find out more
about his idiosyncratic work. He makes me a cup of
tea, settles down, and starts from the beginning. “I
entered art college at the age of 17, and was thrown
straight into a life drawing class,” he says. “We had
to paint a naked woman. It was rather an unsettling
experience for me, even more so when the principal
walked into the class, asked ‘which one’s Dean?’ and
hauled me out, telling me I shouldn’t be in there.
‘You studied Maths and Physics, you shouldn’t be
doing this course’. I was assigned to an industrial
design course, and ended up designing furniture.”
This was a lucky break, he soon found out, because
the fine art students soon stopped being taught
draftsmanship skills, which had become deeply
unfashionable. “Fortunately for me, designers
continued to be taught how to draw and paint. This
destructive trend has continued to this day, where the
crafts of art have largely disappeared. Art, as taught
in this country, is now based more on ideas and
the execution is increasingly irrelevant. I find this
disappointing, because conceptual art was invented
90 years ago. It was a limited but interesting idea,
then. Now, despite being such old hat, it has become
the dominant force in the art world, so much so that
there are very few Art Colleges which teach you to
draw any more.”
This might sound strange coming from a man whose
work looks so surreal, but he insists that his work is
based on reality more than one might think. “Most of
my images are ‘portraits’ of natural phenomena such
as rocks and trees, I might distort them a little, of
course, but they are based on real things I have seen.”