The artwork of Dean Morrissey weaves a delightful fabric from the threads of reality and imagination. In his paintings, Morrissey utilizes a dynamic range of visual elements that are at once familiar and fantastic. With shifts and spins of perspective, Morrissey's art enters the province of enchantment and adventure.
Morrissey is a Bostonian who lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son. He has been creating pictures, in one form or another, all his life. As a boy, Morrissey was inspired by the stills, matte paintings and cells of Disney. He has been influenced by the work and techniques of many great artists, particularly Rembrandt and Vermeer as well as N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle. Morrissey was a freelance illustrator in New York for ten years, winning many awards and honors for his book cover illustrations for more than 15 publishers -- a career he found demanding, instructive and rewarding. In the late 1970s, he began pursuing a full-time career as a painter. Morrissey is also a writer as well as a painter and has combined his talents, writing and illustrating a children's book entitled Ship of Dreams.
What intrigues Morrissey most about a picture is what it suggests, not all elements need to be of the fantastic. The visual components of Morrissey's paintings are engaging elements of ordinary life that provide foundations for the artist's extraordinary twists. "In my paintings," says Morrissey, "I put forth a scene that is within a familiar frame of reference -- from this point of departure the journey begins."
Morrissey's pictures invite the viewer to suspend disbelief. "Sometimes," says Morrissey, "a painting suggests another realm, a place of peculiar machines, creations and characters which can exist and function only when the imagination is engaged. By combining diverse elements, light, shadow, color and human warmth -I try to create an accessible universe." Morrissey's artwork encompasses the realm of musing, dreaming, wishing and, perhaps, of remembering.
Courtesy Mill Pond Press
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