A wide selection of Roger Dean's artwork is featured below including limited edition fine art prints and original drawings and paintings. Please contact us with questions or to enquire about pricing an original or commissioned piece.
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Roger Dean is an internationally recognized artist and designer. He became popular through the medium of album covers and posters, and his work has sold in excess of one hundred million copies world-wide in its many forms. He created a new genre of work with his evocative and visionary images, associated graphics, logos, and lettering.
Born in 1944 in Ashford Kent, England, he has designed album covers for such bands as Yes, Uriah Heep, Osibisa, Asia, and Greenslade. In addition to his well known album cover designs, he is also known for his three-dimensional designs in London and California. The album covers of the bands he worked with became windows into Dean's world. The covers portrayed richly coloured landscapes where continuously cascading waterfalls and pools flow upon floating islands, are recurring themes.
When Dean left the Royal College of Art in 1968, his first commission was to design furniture for Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London. This eventually lead him to produce a cover painting and logo for Osibisa, a Ghanaian and Caribbean band producing Afrobeat music. This painting depicted a brilliantly colored elephant along with an equally colourful logo, both of which were a dramatic contrast to the generally more conservative band portraits commonly seen on the covers of records at the time. This meant that his Osibisa cover was frequently hung in record store windows to attract attention and bring "happy music" to the grey city streets of London in the 1970s.
Soon after his collaboration with Osibisa, Dean was commissioned to produce a painting for the band Yes. This painting, the cover image for the album Fragile, marked the beginning of a forty-seven year association between them, and Dean's iconic logo became the visual signature for the group.
Dean is also known for his logo designs for companies including for Tetris, Virgin, Harvest, Vertido and Psygnosis. His career as a painter and typeface designer, are just two aspects of Dean's multi-faceted career. Roger and his brother Martyn started Dragon's Dream, a market pioneer in the book publishing business, bringing the work of many artists in addition to his own, to an international audience.
Dean's M.A. thesis was written on the psychology of space and his designs for living homes have been based upon research that gives priority to these concerns. His organic architectural designs were ahead of their time as well as aesthetically pleasing. Human in scale, his designs focus on the intuitive need to feel safe and calm within a domestic environment.
His artwork has been exhibited around the globe, and he has been a special and beloved feature at San Francisco Art Exchange LLC since 1990. His original artworks and fine-art prints are held in many major private collections in addition to the V&A Museum in London, and the MAK Museum in Vienna.