Like his last exhibition, these monochrome abstract paintings, are inspired by the California landscape, specifically the Kern River hadwater in the Sierra Nevada. The artist writes about this new body of work:

The shapes of the new paintings are derived from the shape of the Kern River headwater region in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. The Kern River begins near Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the continental United States, and courses south southeast for 100 miles in a near straight line before it empties out into the California desert

This Sierra Nevada landscape, the tall crumbled and dented surface of land rising along one of the earth’s major plates at the eastern edge of the Pacific, is the interface of two dynamic systems: the slowly moving earth surface and the more volatile air and moisture filled atmosphere. A similar dynamic interaction can be easily observed between the more fluid ocean surface and the atmosphere. The ocean surface modulates into waves of different sizes under the influence of gravity and the weather. The small troughs and waves nearby have similar shapes to the large troughs and waves far away. The view changes while paradoxically staying the same, both in scale and pattern.

The land modulates and flows as well, just much more slowly. Any section of the earth’s surface frames myriad evolving events: erosion, geological intrusion, decay, growth, disturbances, blossoming, ripening, corroding, collapsing, contracting, expanding—all at various rates. The view of this slowly undulant land changes markedly as the light changes. The states of change experienced while gazing over a landscape, provide the comfort of a lively but steady state: action and equilibrium in one view.

A valley or watershed is one of the few features of the earth’s surface that has a natural boundary. These paintings are shaped maps of the upper Kern River; they capture the shape of that watershed. In the paintings the scale changes from miles to inches. Valleys become niches and mountains become bumps. The large curves and pitches of the flowing land become human-scaled wavelets. The look of the painting changes, just as the look of the landscape does, as the light fluctuates.

The transition from nature to geometry here is accomplished with triangular tiles and single colors. The shapes of these seven monochrome paintings, four diagonal and three rectangular, are built on molds. The molds are scaled down models of sections of the Kern River’s topography.

The shapes of the diagonals are configured out of a chain of five equilateral triangles. They angle at 60 degrees from the floor: the two smaller diagonal paintings angle to the left and the two larger ones break to the right. The rectangular paintings have the 4:7 proportion of a rectangle inscribed in a hexagon. Any of the paintings may be oriented with one or the other edge as up.

The painting forms are laid up out of plywood tiles, interleaved with fiberglass and epoxy resin. The forms are primed with gesso, sanded and then painted with several layers of a single color.

Deese’s discs and diagonally oriented rectangles float on the wall in bas-relief, altering our perception of the rectilinear space surrounding them, while conjuring vast mountain ranges, rivers and vistas of nature at its purest and most meditative.