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05/14/2007: "DEAN MITCHELL: Easy in his own skin" by Walter King
Dean and I used to sweep the halls and studios together at CCAD back in the late 70's. We both had scholarships though I'm sure Dean's was bigger than mine. We were both on the Federal work-study program because it helped us with a little more food and rent money each month. We swept, moved studio furniture, mopped and waxed all weekend or after class in the evenings during the week. It gave us a lot of time to talk. Dean always wanted to be a realist. He liked Hopper and Wyeth. I on the other hand was into expressionism and liked Matisse and Diebenkorn. We often debated about the differences. I remember him working on a small egg tempera while we were in school. It was a small self portrait done in a warm palette. One of the faculty found it while cleaning out an old storage room. I run across it sometimes when I'm looking for examples to show students. I keep meaning to get it back to him but I can never lay my hands on it when he’s on campus. The little piece is only about 5" x 7" and was in the style of Wyeth but with better color. Dean's color came more from Hopper than Wyeth. His love of detail came from Wyeth and his love of people came most likely from his grandmother. She raised him in Quincy, Florida and he loves and honors her to this day. His figures are less stylized than Hoppers. They have a different presence, less like Hopper's stiff doll like figures in those New England spaces. Dean's figures are alive in their environments more like Wyeth's who seem to breath the clear light he bathes them in.
We were both Illustration majors but we both knew we wanted to be painters and took as many painting and drawing classes as most fine arts majors. Illustration looked like a quicker way to make a living to us and the figure was a bit more important in the Illustration department than Fine Arts at the time. I had a wife and kid depending on me for their needs. Dean on the other hand was just a very clear thinker. He had a plan and he had the emotional support and encouragement from his grandmother. I remember him saying he would begin entering Watercolor Society shows around the country and he felt that was a good way to begin. Eventually he was one of the youngest members ever elected to the National Watercolor Society. After he graduated he landed a job at Hallmark cards in Kansas City. He didn't like Hallmark much but it gave him an income for a couple years while he did Watercolor Society shows on the side. After two years he left Hallmark to strike out on his own. He eventually landed some impressive freelance work like his six portraits for the US Postal Service Jazz Musicians stamp series. Dean did the Louis Armstrong stamp as well as Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Eroll Garner.
Meanwhile I went to work for a few years in advertising. I'd been a freelance designer and illustrator and worked briefly as an art director for an ad agency in Columbus later while still in school so I knew the business. Probably my biggest success was the print media for the 12 part PBS series "Profiles in American Art" aired in '83. Eventually I too lost interest in commercial art. I had wanted to teach since 1979. It had been part of my plan to get myself through school as a commercial artist, then to teach while I began working on my painting.. So after a short term at Wichita State University I went back to school to get my MFA at Boston University. I took a trip the summer before entering BU to visit their campus and to research Boston. My wife was pregnant and I wasn't sure we could afford to live in Boston. So I wanted to see what I was getting into. The sister of a friend promised me work with DC Heath Publishing so I thought I could make it work.
On the way home to Oklahoma I decided to swing through Kansas City to visit some friends from college who were working or had worked for Hallmark. My friend Anita Hinders called around for me and I managed to catch up with Dean at the Crown Center during a performance by Miles Davis. Davis was dressed all in white bathed in blue lights cool as a cucumber. He was humped up over his horn like it was a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, not facing the audience, always facing stage right or stage left. Dean and I listened for a while from the back of the standing audience. From where we stood at the very edge of the crowd we could talk quietly about his reasons for leaving Hallmark and the shows he'd been in. Dean had his eyes on Davis the whole time we talked.
At that time Dean was just starting to build his reputation. He was a little disappointed by Hallmark as I recall. He felt like there was a lot of jealousy because he was getting into watercolor shows while one or another of his colleagues were being rejected. I think he was trying to decide if his troubles at Hallmark had more to do with racial distinctions or the more typical and ubiquitous work place pecking order. Dean does not seem in a hurry to assume that race is behind every form of discrimination or rejection. And even if it is his attitude allows him a grace that usually achieves the higher ground. He's a very balanced person, very grounded, centered and very easy in his own skin. Dean is also quite focused and professional-- a clean cut handsome guy, soft spoken, very bright. He has a good sense of humor adorned by that twinkle in his eye and his quick smile. You could say he was conservative. I don't mean in a political sense. In fact politics is a subject we've never broached so I honestly don't know his politics on a personal level, only the hints I get from his work. I often thought he might have been a minister's son. He is very encouraging and up-beat. He's done a little teaching and I bet he is a great teacher.
I began teaching at CCAD after I finished my grad studies. Soon after that I ran into Dean's ex-wife who was still living in Columbus. She was trying to sell Dean's work locally. She wanted to bring Dean back for a visiting artist stint at the college and hopefully land him a show at the Columbus Museum. I was the visiting artist coordinator for my department at the time and was able to help her bring Dean in for the lecture. The President wasn't particularly excited by the idea, and in fact we did run into some minor racial discrimination in the process, but we prevailed upon the administration and they eventually relented and invited Dean to speak.
When all was said and done the college fell in love with him and he has been a regular speaker ever since sometimes giving the orientation speech to incoming freshmen on what can be done with an art education. Although Dean has a BFA he says he is largely self taught. And I tend to agree that all an education can do is to help you learn how to think critically, point you in the right direction and make sure you work through certain primary experiences. But a good student does the work and learns his own lessons from it. Dean now gives a small scholarship to a promising black student every year. And he was included in an exhibition at the Columbus Museum featuring African American artists from Columbus. So the plan worked.
His work is crisply drawn often with strong contrasts and touches of bright color.He works in oils, watercolor, egg temopera and graphite. Once he visited me in my Columbus studio and we talked about de Kooning and Rothko for over an hour. I had noticed more and more of an abstract organization in some of his more recent works at the time which is how we got onto the subject. I find it a commonality that realists, the really good ones, seem to get a lot out of various abstract painting ideas. In fact I don't find much real difference between figurative and non-objective painting when it is good. All art has a basis in observation at some level and abstract translational energies on another.
So while he is strictly a realist Dean loves abstract painting and once you get past the facts of his realism you begin to see how he chooses his shapes and arranges them as form and space, light a shadow. He works from his own photographs adjusting tones and colors liberally to release intense energies from the underlying abstraction.
As he began to get some reputation he turned his focus more and more on black faces, black people standing on urban corners, doing their jobs or old black men sitting on the street corner of a café talking. But Dean is insistent on the fact that his intent is not to make art about 'race'. It's just that the subjects he paints are the ones he knows the best. On this subject he has been quoted a number of times. He says:
“My work is not about color; it's about life. Once you get to know your
subjects, you can develop a love that comes through in your work. In the end,
you hope you can do something that will help people come together. Emotions
are universal, no matter what color the skin."
Dean has an intuitive knack for finding the dignity of any sitter or model, even when working from photos. In this he is like Rembrandt who could turn the lowliest Amsterdam ghetto dwellers into a Christ.
In the 90's Dean had a great two page review in the Christian Science Monitor and was winning awards like crazy. By 2002 Michael Kimmelman called him 'a virtual modern-day Vermeer' in a review in "The New York Times". Dean was beginning to win serious awards. He'd competed for the $250,000 Hubbard Award for Excellence, he told me, because winning such a prestigious award would give him status with collectors. Mitchell was one of five finalists and the only recognized black artist in the Hubbard exhibit. His piece was a really stunning painting of a black butler wearing a traditional dark butler's tux and white gloves. Rumor has it that he just missed the quarter million dollar award by one place. It wasn't a bust though because his painting called "Rowena" which was also in the show won a $25,000 purchase award from the museum. He also received the $50,000 Grand Prize for the Arts in the Parks competition in 1999. He won the American Watercolor Society 131st Annual International Exhibition AWS Gold Medal. He was named a "Best Bet" for collectors in ARTnews by R. Crosby Kemper Jr., founder of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
His work is in the permanent collections of the St. Louis Art Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Margaret Harwell Art Museum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hubbard Museum, Mississippi Art Museum and the Arkansas Art Center.
One night some time back around 11 o'clock I got a phone call just as I was finishing some things in the studio and was preparing for bed. It was Dean. He explained that he'd been invited to speak at the college but no one was sent to meet him at the airport which was their usual protocol. So after waiting for some time he decided to take a cab to his hotel. He said he couldn't sleep and wanted to grab a bite to eat and maybe have a drink. Would I meet him? So I drove up to his hotel and we met in the restaurant. I got a beer, he had a sandwich and we talked about his career. He said he knew that he got a lot of attention because of his African American roots. But in the beginning of his career he wouldn't make any mention of race because he didn't want it to bias anyone's decisions about him. Apparently he'd had experiences that he wanted to avoid. He said it was always a surprise when he'd show up to collect an award and it became obvious that no one realized he was a young black man. He got that little quip of a smile on his face retelling it, a confidence built upon each of his successes.
Billy Dee Williams made a documentary called "The Living Canvas." It was a PBS series about art. Dean was featured along with Thomas Blackshear, another African American painter/illustrator who also did some of the stamps for the Postal Service jazz and blues series.
Dean was also the subject of a documentary by Joan Holman as well and a new documentary on Dean's work and life will air on PBS sometime this year. The film makers thought it would be interesting if Dean came back to his alma mater for a visit. We set up a slide lecture and panel discussion in the school auditorium. Stew McKissick and I, both faculty and old friends of Dean's from school asked him questions and plied his memory with our own. We talked about his painting issues and his life goals. The film makers also did single interviews with a number of us who were students with Dean or his former teachers. It was an interesting experience being in a documentary. I've only been in one other about a show I co-curated a few years back. I'm looking forward to seeing how they put it all together. The film is called The Making of a Master and is supposed to air on PBS sometime later this year or maybe early next year.
I can still remember us cleaning our mops and buckets one afternoon in the mop closet in what is now Kinney Hall in 1979 while Dean told me of his plan to first enter and get into watercolor shows, then hopefully begin to win some awards as a platform for a larger career as a painter…I could almost see it all through his eyes as he talked about how he was going to do it. You know, to be honest, at the time I thought he had pretty lofty dreams-- pipe dreams really. I took it all with a grain of salt and humored him. You know, a lot of people talk big, but few live up to their own dreams let alone fulfill the promise of their own talents. I'd like to say I wish I was in Dean's shoes, but nobody can put on someone else's skin like a suit of clothes. You've got to grow your own skin from the inside. Dean wears his with elegance and grace.
You can see more of Dean's work at:
http://www.streckerfinearts.com/feature.php
http://12.108.68.197/cgi-bin/ARTstore.cgi?user_action=list&category=Artists;Dean%20Mitchell
