PAINTINGS & EXHIBITIONS

Eric Dever’s latest paintings stem from his enthusiastic embrace of nature. He enthralls us with some of his favorite flowers, from Bird of Paradise to roses—as well as by his landscapes—both representational and imagined. Titles like Orient, Central Coast, Highway 1, and Monterey, merely hint at some of his peregrinations and their legacy.

This new body of work stands in contrast to what I first observed in Dever’s painting years ago, when he imposed on his artistic process a serious and disciplined exploration of material and method. For a long while, he limited himself to working entirely in monochrome, only gradually evolving from all white, to white and black, to adding one variety of red: Napthol Scarlet. At the time, Dever was deep into the exploration of material nature, inspired by Yoga and Indian philosophy, especially Samkhya, which teaches that everything in reality is derived from the self, the soul, or the intellect, as well as from creative agency or energy.

Not surprisingly, Dever’s new pictures do not seek to replicate nature, but instead vibrate between representation and abstraction, a kind of rhythmic dance expressing both what he later recalls in his mind’s eye and, simultaneously, how exhilarated he feels while he loses himself in nature. He relies upon self-discipline or self-study, some of which he has absorbed from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

Yet Dever’s very personal observations of nature reflect in part his own journey from Los Angeles, where he was born in 1962, and grew up, to New York City, where he received his Master of Arts degree in painting at New York University in 1988. After years of painting while employed part time in the city in the prestigious architectural firm of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, Dever moved in 2002 even further east—to Southampton, New York, on the East End of Long Island. To say that Dever’s vision of nature has its roots on the West Coast, while he is now fully engaged on the East Coast, only begins to come to terms with the particularity of his observations.

Dever doesn’t paint nature, he paints his experience of it. His personal expression calls to mind an earlier painter who also migrated from Los Angeles to New York City to study painting, then moved out to the Hamptons on Long Island’s East End: Jackson Pollock, who famously responded to Hans Hofmann’s question, “Do you work from nature?” by proclaiming: “I am nature.” As it did for Pollock, the natural landscape on Long Island offers Dever both stimulation and direction that has found its way into his paintings.

In Dever's Southampton studio, set in the picturesque garden that he himself designed, I looked at the gorgeous diptych Lily of the Nile (also called Agapanthus and featured in another of the new works), and I found myself recalling the garden of Claude Monet (1840-1926), in Giverny, France, which inspired the late paintings of waterlilies that famously disregarded boundaries and moved toward abstraction. Critics have long since linked Monet’s late “all-over painting” to Pollock’s abstractions. Now Dever’s over-sized depiction of the lavender blue agapanthus, this time extending over two large canvases, continues in this gestural tradition.

Dever’s purposeful use of the raw linen surface in Lily of the Nile in fact links to Abstract Expressionism’s influence. As a young painter in New York, Dever learned indirectly from Milton Resnick (1917-2004), whose advice to his students was to use the raw surface of his pictures as a compositional element. Dever recalls reading a 2011 Art News article by David Reed that quoted Resnick’s adamant instruction to students: “You have to break through the surface.”

The flowers in Dever’s new paintings range from exotic subtropicals like agapanthus, amaryllis, or calla lily to locally hardy favorites like roses, dogwood, and lilac. He hasn’t let go of his hometown memories, where he recalls subtropical Bird of Paradise flowers thriving on urban traffic islands or agapanthus and calla lilies growing along driveways. The mild, dry, Mediterranean-like climate of Los Angeles contrasts with the colder, wet climate of Eastern Long Island. Dever explained, “What is common in Los Angeles becomes precious in the Northeast.”

But Eastern Long Island also projects a legacy of modernist painting, from which Dever, the 2022 artist resident at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, has absorbed lessons that he uses to create his own style of painting. For example, Max Ernst, who like many Surrealists fled to the United States during World War II (and worked briefly on Long Island in 1944), invented in 1920s Germany a technique that he called grattage, in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Dever utilizes a similar process of scraping paint in works like Tipping Point, referring to a fleeting image of the towering pale blooms of a plant called yucca that grows on both coasts. He also adapted from Ernst the technique of pressing paint from one surface onto another, known as decalcomania.

Dever used decalomania in his painting, Myself as a Rose, which he picked as the flower with which he “self-identifies,” a kind of Duchampian theme of disguise or alter-ego. The blossom in question is colored a bright coral-orange, the prize progeny of his own garden. From the microcosm of nature at home to the macrocosm of the larger landscape, Dever finds meaning and stimulation in his visual field. Recipient of a 2020 Warhol Foundation/Nature Conservancy-Montauk Project Artist residency, Dever painted at the eastern most tip of Long Island, responding directly to the blue summer hues of twilight that the French call l’heure bleue. This vision is especially evident in works like Lavender Memory, where light and energy work to communicate a sense of awe reflecting the time of day and the passing of seasons. “To Look at Things in Bloom,” the name Dever has chosen for this body of work, is adapted from a line of verse from the Loveliest of Trees by the English classical scholar and poet, A. E. Housman (1859-1936). This choice places Dever in sympathy with artists and poets of the modernist era, whose work still has much to teach us.

--Gail Levin, Distinquished Professor at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has written extensively on Abstract Expressionism and other aspects of American modern art. She is the author of Lee Krasner: A Biography and other books. © Gail Levin, Ph.D.

As part of the U.S. State Department's Art in Embassies program, paintings by the Water Mill based artist Eric Dever are on view in the Embassy residence of Ambassador Douglas Thomas Hickey in Helsinki, Finland, in an exhibition curated by Camille Benton. The exhibition also includes work by Roy Lichtenstein, Gifford Beal, Jessica Snow, Mary Heebner and Pamela DeTuncq.

A local newspaper notes participation in the Art in Embassies exhibition at the U.S. Embassy Ambassador’s Residence in Helsinki, “Designing Landscapes: Expression and Evolution,” 2022-25. “The Helsinki exhibition features Dever’s mural scaled, oil on canvas diptych, titled October (2016), Dever’s self-identification with nature is echoed in his sampling of colorful morning glory blossoms which form the scaffolding of this painting. The blossoms were found within a 3.6 mile radius of Dever’s Water Mill studio garden and echo the distance and collection of pollen by bees whose hives are tended onsite. Dever’s oeuvre embraces both materiality, craftsmanship and a history of shared growth between the artist, his garden and painting.”—The Sag Harbor Express, 2024

These paintings are part of a larger body of work— 38 paintings, a selection first exhibited by Berry Campbell, New York in 2019. 

An earlier suite of Dever’s large format paintings, NSIBTW-40 and NSIBTW-22, was previously exhibited in the United States Consulate of Hong Kong and Macau in 2016-19.

In 2020, Eric Dever became a project artist at The Andy Warhol Preserve Visual Arts Program in Montauk, New York. The artist created a series of works related to the landscape and the natural world. This opportunity allowed Dever to have a private place to escape the pandemic world. As a result, the artist created this important group of 18 paintings.

Midpoint through the project, Dever turned his attention from Amsterdam Beach to the greater Montauk area. Upon exploration, Dever found a brochure distributed at the Montauk lighthouse appropriately titled, “The Explorer’s Club,” originally published in the 1950s. Dever learned about the Montauketts, the land, and the people of Eastern Long Island.

In the Warhol Montauk Project series, Eric Dever takes cues from Warhol’s Self-Portrait (1966) pairing primary and secondary colors, as well as employing the use of different shades of the same color on coarse linen and canvas. Dever applies paint on surfaces rubbed into the support, a process known as decalcomania. Decalcomania was explored by the surrealists and a hallmark of Dever’s painting process. Coupled with ample unpainted surface or negative space the paintings themselves at times resemble serigraphy.

Light sensitivity, shadow, temperature and sound are experiences the artist explores, palpable in these new paintings. The paintings can be viewed online at Artsy or at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York.

Àquas de Março (Waters of March)

artist statement

For many, spring marks the beginning of the year. In the Southern Hemisphere the seasons follow in the opposite progression. I experience spring as a touchstone, a new beginning, a self awareness in nature which my paintings track. This season has been spent much closer to home. I find myself paying particular attention to spring as it unfolds, from a dim yellow or green in March, to pale pinks which build in intensity through April, followed in May by the return of the tree canopy first experienced as red and bright green hues exploding with everything that comes along with it.

I grew up listening to bossa nova, Antonio Carlos Jobim and his song, Àguas de Março, one of Brazil's all time hits (published in 1972) and popular worldwide. The lyrics present a series of images as the melody descends, which tracks the rain in March, carrying sticks, stones, bits of everything down the streets of Rio de Janerio to the Atlantic. I find the song as joyful, as the pandemic grim, and struggle, remembering, as spring turns into summer and so on.

Eric Dever’s paintings harken from experiences deep within his sensory memory, including growing up in California. “Los Angeles is subtropical, the sun is more intense and sets over the Pacific.” 

In Drive-By-Art (Public Art in this Moment of Social Distancing) organized by Waren Neidich, Dever paints his experience of plants that he cultivates in his Water Mill studio garden. Forms appear weightless and at times dematerialize reversing figure and ground. These sensations inform Dever’s work today here on the East End of Long Island becoming examples of a type of compressed time. Dever developed his full spectrum visual language after years of studying white, black, and red, which the artist describes as like breaking a long fast, and continuing his inclusion of color, he arrived at his current work.

Eric Dever: A Thousand Nows, an exhibit of 22 new oil paintings inspired mostly by the East End of Long Island, will be exhibited at Suffolk County Community College’s Eastern Campus Lyceum Gallery

Layering veils of exuberant color, Dever creates the illusion of depth while describing atmosphere that falls over views of Montauk Point, Sag Harbor’s Clam Island, and Southampton’s Flying Point Beach. Forms appear weightless and at times dematerialize reversing figure and ground. Similarly, Dever paints his experience of plants that he cultivates in his Water Mill studio garden. Agapanthus, Bird of Paradise, and roses that are past their prime become metaphors for the past, evocative of places and characters from literature.

Dever’s work harkens from experiences deep within his sensory memory of growing up in California.  “Los Angeles is subtropical, the sun is more intense and sets over the Pacific, my paint selection, when working with a full palette has remained consistent, especially a love of Cadmium Orange; but the blue hues I am mixing echo the long late spring and summer twilight of the Northeast,” Dever said.

These sensations inform Dever’s work today here on the East End becoming examples of a type of compressed time. Dever developed his full spectrum visual language after years of studying white, black, and red, which the artist describes as like breaking a long fast, and continuing his inclusion of color, he arrived at his current work.

In January 2019 Dever’s exhibit Painting in a House Made of Air, at Berry Campbell in New York attracted a large audience. 

Dever’s 2017 exhibit Light, Energy and Matter at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles featured 45 works covering his visual interpretation of natural forces. 

At New York University’s Kimmel Galleries in 2015, Dever exhibited Clarity, Passion, and Dark Inertia, 29 works that spanned a decade.

Dever’s paintings are in a number of public collections including Grey Art Gallery, New York University, the Parrish Art Museum and Guild Hall. Dever’s paintings are currently on view in U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong and Macau as part of the United States Department of State Art in Embassies Exhibition program.

Dever earned a Master of Arts from New York University in 1988 and worked in the architecture firm, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in New York, while continuing to exhibit his paintings.  He moved to the East End in 2002 and became immersed in the artistic community.

At Guild Hall his work, a 5 x 10 foot painting was placed on stage for Joseph Pintauro’s play, Cloud Life, as part of the “The Painting Plays”. Artist Robert Dash, invited Dever to teach the first painting classes at the Madoo Conservancy.

--Margery Gosnell Gua, associate professor and artist

artist statement

For more than a decade, I worked with a square canvas and limited palette, white for four years, then white and black for two years, followed by white, black, and red. I uncovered a remarkable variety, both in hue and composition, most notable when the work was installed together, each painting held its own.

The shift began when I let go of the square and moved to a rectangular format, there was no longer a central area of interest, but multiple areas of concentration. More strikingly, I rediscovered color—not just one at a time, but the entire spectrum, color as a painting program, the color spectrum as abstraction, the universe reflected in nature. 

This new palette began 2 years ago while I was planting a garden, coupled with an awareness of the Indian and yogic notion of the chakras, 7 energetic centers in the human body where matter and consciousness meet, which also parallel the visible spectrum. I found myself taking cues from flowers as they blossomed, their color entered my paintings. At the height of the summer I had used all of it, mostly mixing tints, Titanium White with Napthol Scarlet, Quinacridone Red, Cadmium Orange, Hansa Yellow, Phthalo Green, Phthalo Blue and Dioxaine Purple. The apprehension of color stuck with me, and by the following summer I began mixing new hues.

Painting for me, when it really ‘happens,’ is as miraculous as any natural phenomenon.2 —Lee Krasner

My painting approach also involves exchanging shapes between canvases, often through a mono print process of painting onto a surface and pressing it onto canvas, techniques to intricacy which recall the invention of Jean Dubuffet and decalcomania of Max Ernst. The painting January 13th-The Women’s March, includes a second canvas which echoes the composition of half the original, the sum implying a triptych, though actually a diptych of unequal proportions. Others include forms are mirrored top to bottom within a single painting, August 5th-North Fork; or between similarly dimensioned supports, July 17th, February 15th, March 1st; and the Prickly Pear Cactus Suite: September 4th, October 3rd, October 9th, and December 14th-Green Joy.

These (Dever’s) repetitions of forms and other planned elements, together with the more gestural painting of the rest of the canvas, creates a charged tension between spontaneity and organization, one of the ways de Kooning worked.3 —Jennifer Landes

Unpainted canvas, or ground as shape, contribute to an atmospheric openness in the paintings, spreading and breathing. Some sections or shapes of unpainted canvas are formally revealed as negative space, and more personally, a portal or meditation on absence, as in March 16th-Cala Lily, May 25th-The Jade Buddha, June 21st-The Venetian Lemon, Villa Francesco, July 16th-Narrow River and July 16th-Lavender Pilgrimage.

Automatism, methods of mining the unconscious popularized by the Surrealists, breathes life into the work, reflecting catastrophes or alternately “…an obstinate dedication to fight everything repressive in the conventional wisdom.4 

The use of dates as titles includes a progression from the solar calendar to events, reminiscence and homage, journal like entries associated with memory and location, including Hindu festivals, September 13th--Ganesh Chaturthi and February 13th-Maha Shivratri. July 31st-Franklin Avenue, is an homage to artist and teacher Corita Kent. In July 14th-Sherbourne Drive and August 26th-Glenbarr Avenue, angst of the past lifts as I reclaim happier moments.

The joyful shock of walking into Berry Campbell’s Chelsea art gallery was to see an exhibition saturated with color....“This change must have come from here,” touching his chest. “Is this about Joe?” His expression shifted from the commercial smile of a solitary artist forced to entertain his followers, to one of man grieving a dear friend. He nodded. Eric worked intimately with the brilliant playwright Joe Pintauro. The two shared a love of the painterly and writerly disciplines. After valiantly fighting cancer, Pintauro died last May in Eastern Long Island, where both men had studios. Eric told me that Pintauro had written a play (“A House Made of Air”) from which Eric took the name of his exhibition, “Painting in a House Made of Air.” The play was inspired by a memoir of grief that spoke to Pintauro (Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XCIV)...”5

—Gail Sheehy

“Art is healing, condensed information.”6

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1 Sri Swami Tapovan Maharai Chimmaya, ‘Wanderings in the Himalaya’s,’ Glory of the Mother. National Chinmaya Mission Trust, Bombay, 1991, pxii

2Gail Levin. Lee Krasner: A Biography. Harper Collins, New York, 2011, p28

3Jennifer Landes. (2017, April 6). “Eric Dever: A Year of Discovery,” The East Hampton Star.

Retrieved from http://www.mobileeasthamptonstar.com

4“ The real purpose of Surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even a philosophical movement, but to explore the social order, to transform life itself…and an obstinate dedication to fight everything repressive in the conventional wisdom.” 

Luis Bunuel, My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Bunuel. Random House Inc., New York, 2013, p10

5Gail Sheehy. META, New York, January 2019. The joyful shock of walking into Berry Campbell’s Chelsea art gallery was to see an exhibition saturated with color....“This change must have come from here,” touching his chest. “Is this about Joe?” His expression shifted from the commercial smile of a solitary artist forced to entertain his followers, to one of man grieving a dear friend. He nodded.

Eric worked intimately with the brilliant playwright Joe Pintauro. The two shared a love of the painterly and writerly disciplines. After valiantly fighting cancer, Pintauro died last May in Eastern Long Island, where both men had studios. Eric told me that Pintauro had written a play from which Eric took the name of his exhibition, “Painting in a House Made of Air.” The play was inspired by a memoir of grief that spoke to Pintauro. 

As Eric guided me around his large oil paintings, he told me how he had been consoled in own grief by the splurge of color among the flowers that blossomed in his garden. The entire color spectrum opened up to him. He told me he has used only a six-color palette in these extraordinary paintings, but their richness comes from his mixing of oils to create vibrant new colors and the tension between spontaneity and organization of forms.

The gallery owner, Berry Campbell, laughed when I mentioned this extraordinary shift of subject. “I took on Eric five years ago to represent a minimalist,” she said. “Little did I know he would evolve into…” her head swiveled with a broad smile of pleasure, “THIS!” The exhibit runs until February 9 at 530 W. 24th St. Hope you enjoy this slideshow of paintings.--Gail Sheehy

6“An Evening with Holland Cotter and Lynn Neary,” Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, Fordham University, New York, March 9, 2017.

Parrish Art Museum, Pecha Kucha Volume 19, video

Congratulations to first time Art in Embassies artist, Eric Dever.

His paintings are now living in the U.S. Consul General Hong Kong exhibition, featuring paintings titled NSIBTW-40 and NSIBTW-22, oil on canvas and linen, each measuring 72 x 72 inches. These paintings are part of a larger body of work—24 paintings, a selection first exhibited in 2014 by Berry Campbell Gallery, New York; followed by an installation, The Rose Chapel, at Kaiser Gallery, Molloy College, Rockville Centre, New York. Additional paintings are part of notable public collections including the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill,

New York, Grey Gallery/New York University Art Collection, and Guild Hall Musuem, East Hampton, New York.

Painting exclusively with black, red and white for over 10 years, Dever’s palette represents qualities that bind all of existence. Over time, I have come to associate this palette with shifting qualities of weight, energy, and lightness, which are embodied in the rose paintings; some feel like carved stone, others explosive or very light. The starting point for this group of paintings, both in its essence, genus, was a rose from my garden, which I deconstructed, letting the energetic qualities of color, line, and form emerge.

—Eric Dever, Water Mill, New York, 2015

Elemental and exacting, Dever’s paintings make you feel like he invented color.

—Janet Goleas, Blinnk, East Hampton, New York