Michael J. Deas, The Clearing, 2024, Oil on panel, Collection of the artist

Michael J. Deas is a contemporary realist painter and one of the nation’s premier illustrators. Working from his studio in New Orleans’ historic French Quarter, he creates paintings and drawings with an elegant eye and a mastery of technique rarely encountered in a contemporary context. Deas works primarily in oils painted on wooden panels, employing a combination of the 19th century techniques of grisaille and imprimatura, over which are added layers of semi-opaque paint and transparent glazes.

Raised in suburban New Orleans and later in Long Island, NY, Deas began illustrating novels and children’s books at age 19. He has subsequently gone on to paint six covers for TIME magazine, and 25 postage stamps for the U.S. Postal Service. Two of his stamp portraits, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, are among the best selling in U.S. postal annals. His luminous redesign of the Columbia Pictures logo, painted in 1991, remains one of the most iconic and widely seen images in cinematic history. Recently, his portraits of President George H.W. Bush (2019) and Ruth Bader Ginsberg (2023) were used in the design of new Forever stamps.

In addition to his illustration work, Deas maintains a vigorous personal studio practice, creating masterful allegorical paintings and drawings drawn from his own imagination. In 2012, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art opened the exhibition Michael J. Deas: Paintings and Drawings 1975-2012. That moment marked the first time the general public was able to view not only the illustration works in their original form, but also his personal work. The Ogden is proud to once again unveil a new masterwork from Michael J. Deas in Goldring Hall: The Clearing (2024).

The Clearing depicts a lone figure in an open field under a dramatic sky. A rain storm has just ended and the sky is clearing. This picturesque scene, rife with compositional complexity and spatial depth, offers an emotional depiction of the humid air, saturated light and dramatic sky that exists only in New Orleans after a drenching summer rain. Through giving the painting the simple title, The Clearing, Deas alludes to the landscape, the clearing of the sky, and perhaps an emotional clarity. By capturing this precise moment, Michael J. Deas elevates this masterful landscape into an allegory of hope.