Dean Bloodgood: 70 Years of Painting, Nona Jean Hulsey Gallery at Oklahoma City University, March 1 - April 16, 2021
This exhibition celebrates the accomplishments of Oklahoma artist and educator Dean Bloodgood, whose evolving artistic career spans over seven decades. Working in a variety of media, Bloodgood is a true painter’s painter – an artist who explores and returns to various motifs and themes over the course of his career, displaying the breadth, progression, and evolution of his oeuvre. Landscapes, waterscapes, skyscapes, buildings, interior scenes, windows, the female figure, and more recur in Bloodgood’s paintings and drawings, indicating his interest in exploring new ways to depict certain subjects. His large-scale paintings of trees, streams, trailside scenes, and cloudy skies from various locations across the United States and Mexico display his reverence for nature and the duality of its power as well as his ability to handle and manipulate color. Interior scenes and images of buildings, both commercial and domestic in scale, are studious, contemplative, and occasionally sardonic in their controlled approach to the subject matter. Bloodgood’s renderings of clothed and nude women alike are elegant, sensitive, and sensuous, while offering a personal perspective into his body of work. Absent of narrative, each of Bloodgood’s artworks across subject matter represent a specific moment in time, captured in a paused state by his brushes and pencils. Included in this exhibition are drawings, paintings, ceramic tiles, and three-dimensional works which cumulatively represent a broad range of artistic styles and approaches developed over a lengthy, productive career.
Dean Bloodgood was born in Pomona, California, in 1934, received his BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1958, and completed his MFA at the University of Southern California in 1960. In addition to working as a fine artist, Bloodgood is a lifelong educator. He is a professor emeritus in the Department of Art at Oklahoma State University, where he taught painting for over 40 years beginning in 1964. He has participated in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions around the country since the 1950s, received many awards for his accomplishments, and his work is included in the permanent collections of important museums and institutions nationwide. This exhibition is the artist’s first retrospective in Oklahoma City.
“My interests in art involve attempts to find the transcendent in the everyday. Simplification, a freezing of time, silence, analogies, visual parallels, metaphors and abstracted reality are the major elements I search for as a painting develops. A ‘dumbness’ of design and a gestural quality are formal elements that seem to repeat in my work. I do not want a narrative element in my work, so I try to minimize premature interpretation. If the piece works, I find out upon completion what it’s about.” -Dean Bloodgood
