Satiric Artist
Some say satiric artist ABNER DEAN '31 draws with a third eye - one that sees inside himself and others.
Dean was drawing even before his Jacko days at Dartmouth and he has freelanced from his Manhattan drawing board since. He has produced several books and through the years his work has appeared in almost all the well-known magazines.
He has a kind of Shakespearean gift of human understanding that makes his best comedy tragedy. Abner Dean's naked people (the title of a 1963 collection of his work) are drawn that way because he wants the physical being to be a symbol of the interior being, open to scrutiny. The observer must bring his own being to comprehend Dean's drawings - to "intuit" as he puts it.
Dean has explored interior man in It's a Long Way toHeaven, his first book, published in 1945, and subsequently in What Am I Doing Here?„ And on the EighthDay, Come As You Are, and Cave Drawings for the Future. His more recent books, Wake Me When It's Over and Not Far from the Jungle, are verse with pictures.
Though he couldn't define "inspiration" he says his ideas come largely from caring, from "identification with."
"What is it the Greeks say? 'lf you can care, a way will open.' Well, this is my concern.
"I have no philosophy of humor," he adds. "My only rule is that it not be offensive."
His fans have been called "apostles to the cult." But Dean has succeeded too consistently and over too long a period of time to be considered a fad.
One admirer, Clifton Fadiman, says, "It is pointless to try to 'explain' Abner Dean. His pictures are trick mirrors in which we catch sight of those absurd fragments of ourselves that we never see in the smooth glass of habit. It jolts you into sudden awareness of your own pathos, your own plight, your own unending and gigantic laughableness."
Dean shies from television and public appearances, preferring his studio/home. (They used to be separate but he suffered from "spontaneous nighttimes" at home when his equipment was elsewhere.)
"A discipline evolves through the years," he claims, "which doesn't require a schedule. There are some fallow periods, but I work almost constantly."
Long hours at the drawing board have produced other offspring. He has toyed with song lyrics and poetry, but he calls them "a private medium." So, too, is his sculpture. But he has made almost all his own furniture and is developing a prototype for a line of furniture he wants to market. It's finished wood, but comes disassembled with interlocking pieces. There's a patent pending on his two-level folding table. A new principle of interlocking components is used in his plans for building construction which could be used for emergency housing.
"My maze," he says, "is one of deadlines, delights and dilemmas... dangling participles and sentences that occasionally parse . . . part-time conquest and full-time compromise. There are days when the iron filings fall into place and the patterns are promising... and days of severe mat burns.
"The adventure unfolds with daily attempts to balance the most confusing equations and daily thanks for increasing abilities to communicate in my media."
