Dean Morrissey
Dean Morrissey, "The Telescope of Time," 1992 from The Great Kettles, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997, oil on canvas, Gallery One, Mentor, OH
Dean Morrissey is a native Bostonian who currently lives on the South Shore. After a successful career as a commercial artist in New York city, where he was a freelance book cover illustrator for ten years, he decided to pursue a full-time painting career. Although Morrissey never attended art school, his luminous oil paintings are masterfully executed, and offer viewers a fantasy world filled with flying ships, wizards and fantastic machines. They are ingenuous combinations of reality and imagination.
His first book, Ship of Dreams, was published in 1994, and soon achieved critical recognition including a New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Children's Book award. Since then, Morrissey's career has taken off, and his newest book, The Great Kettles, was just published.
