Dean Melbourne

Dean Melbourne graduated from the University of Wolverhampton in 1999 with a BA Hons in Painting. Dean’s work presents the viewer with intense interpretations of images that occupy his conscious and subconscious self.
Working with a vast selection of imagery from a 1970’s mail order catalogues to The National Geographic, Dean’s paintings sit somewhere in-between the literary tradition and cinematography.
Mixing paint and painting the canvas often under projected light, his bold brush strokes and colour palette present a unique style of painting that breaks the rules of traditional colour pallettes. Totally unique and timeless Dean’s paintings are a rich collaboration of traditional and non-traditional approaches.

“I make studies almost as a comfort. They are in essence an act of mindfulness or meditation. It is key that they are painted not in the landscape but here in my studio. They represent my romantic view of the countryside of staffordshire and shropshire. Places that for me growing up as a child of suburbia held a magic and mystery. Drives home from country pubs looking across the darkening fields or peering into the gloom of woods. Vast open skies that I noticed I could see the weather that was to pass overhead hours later, and those mesmerising glimpse of kestrels, buzzards and other fauna. This is the country that I paint and as I do I return to that place internally, to that boy.

Technically simple,  these fast paced studies represent a stripping back of my complex contemporary practise and expose the painter that I am at my core.”