
“Monument Valley Blooms,” acrylic on canvas. Dean donated this piece to the Ticket-To-Pick-It fundraiser.
She paints the natural world in wild, exuberant color. Beneath the drama is a multi-layered approach that is ordered and disciplined. Jo Jasper Dean shares how her love of color evolved and the influences behind her unique style.
By Kara Dicker
When I spoke with artist Jo Jasper Dean recently, she had just finished a series of acrylic pieces for Heartland Art Club’s V x VII show and donated her Monument Valley Blooms, a celebration of vibrant booming yuccas near a canyon’s edge, also in acrylic, to the annual Ticket-To-Pick-It fundraiser. Upon returning to St. Louis, she says she is looking forward to completing a 48” x 72” floral painting featuring a daylily, inspired by an earlier visit to the Missouri Botanical Gardens.
Meanwhile, from a casita in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this busy artist is soaking up the nourishment of her absolute favorite place. “It feeds my soul, spirit, and creativity,” she says of the Southwestern city she and her husband have visited for decades. For Dean, it’s a place, beyond the galleries and museums, of endless “astonishing landscape,” where return visits to the outlying Abiquiu and the adventure of traveling unexplored backroads fuel her inspiration. “It’s where I’m filling myself up with ideas.”
Dean is a studio painter who works from her own photography using oil and acrylic primarily. “Grounded by nature and powered by color,” is how she describes her style. Her depictions of the natural world- its blooming plants, extraordinary animals, and dramatic landscape features, contain the application of heightened color, often described as exhilarating, energetic, and dynamic. Inside The Galleries of Heartland Art Club, where this year Dean became a Signature Member, her featured works stand out.
Dean’s interest in bold color was spurred at an early age due in part to her mother’s interest in interior decorating. Dean recalls the living room of their St. Louis home designed in strictly black and white, except for a single color that would change with the season. Dean got to help select the lone, isolated color that would appear in the candles and other decorative items. “Bold yellows, red, blue, purple, orange,” she recalls. By the time she was a teenager, most colors of the palette had been guests of the neutral-toned living space one color, one season at a time.
Growing up, Dean’s artistic interests had the support of both her parents. Her father, a police officer, “dabbled in oil painting,” she says. At St. Joseph’s Academy, Dean had an advocate in Sister Colette Marie, her art teacher. “She let me experiment with many different mediums in the studio.” In recent years, Dean says she’s benefitted from the teaching of Mark Weber, an esteemed instructor at St. Louis Community College in Wildwood. “His instruction and encouragement were invaluable.”
Dean began her career as a professional artist in 2009 after retiring from the corporate arena. As a painter, Dean’s technique echoes the order, discipline, and open-mindedness she learned in the business world, if not also from her mother’s own austere yet creative decorative style. Like the17th century Dutch painter Rembrandt, whom she admires, Dean creates a grisaille underpainting that serves as a foundation for each work. From there, she adds a top layer of loose brushstrokes reminiscent of French Impressionist painter Claude Monet, whom she also admires. Whereas Monet’s work features the push and pull of receding cool colors and emerging warm tones, Dean employs fully saturated colors. She plans and premixes all the colors and values on her palette beforehand, a process that is time and labor consuming. “I may have eight different values per color,” she says. Dean likes to place complementary colors next to each other to maximize their intensity. She is careful they never touch. Doing so would result in the undesired neutralization of color. “I don’t use neutrals.”
It’s no surprise that when it comes to favorite colors, she has a few: “Orange in terms of what I wear, terra cotta for interior design, and magenta and lime green for painting, they (the latter) give a nice energy,” Dean says.
In addition to Heartland Art Club, where Dean says she is “honored to be among a group of incredible artists,” her work can be viewed locally at the Wildwood Hotel in Wildwood. Beginning in November her work will be featured downtown at Art St. Louis in its annual Art St. Louis 40, The Exhibition (Nov. 2- Dec. 19).