Yes and Roger Dean (A Man of Kent).

 

ROGER Dean's painting has a strange effect upon me, familiar yet strange, quietly stirring. The worlds he depicts are perhaps vague portions of a semi-conscious dream. That his work should be associated with the music of the progressive rock band Yes is a happy circumstance, an example of the like-minded attracting. 

   For a reason not altogether clear to me this album Tales from Topographic Oceans bridges in my mind the space between the ethereal essence of music and the illusory world of dreaming, such as DeQuincy attempted to contain into his opium-inspired work Suspiria de Profundis.

    I cannot easily explain why these different media appear to me to share an affinity, to be of a species with one another. They evoke that mysterious feeling of déjà vu, which is along with dreaming and laughter a subjective experience difficult to logically rationalise.

 

   Perhaps it is the absence of population or the spanning appearance of the landscapes, skyscapes, seascapes, or dreamscapes. The blues I think play a particular importance but also the vibrancy of light.
 

   I remember one summer's afternoon when, hearing the crickets and watching a distant heathaze on a road set about with verdant hedges, I felt a similar feeling stirred within me. It is in those lines in Keats' Ode to a Nightingale:

 

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

         Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

         Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

     The longest age, which is of course as long and as short as the shortest age without perception, might pass through many of these scenes in alien planets without habitation. Simple sculptures traced out as a dream is traced by the mind, so vividly with a reality almost more real than that of the waking consciousness, by the very essence of God.

 

   

     As indeed are these paintings of Roger Dean themselves such effluences of the Almighty, for there can be nothing which is beyond a creativity of infinite potential. It is not a thing difficult to understand, though it is impossible to comprehend. It can be heard, and listened to, without effort, but no hand may write the notation of the melody. Analysis must cease, sympathy prevail.