Traditional American Solutions, John Dewey, 2025, oil on canvas, 75 x 46 in. / 190.5 x 116.84 cm.

Land and History in Paintings by John Dewey

December 28, 2025 Gavin Coates

Featured image: Traditional American Solutions, John Dewey, 2025, oil on canvas, 75 x 46 in. / 190.5 x 116.84 cm.

John Dewey’s recent paintings examine landscapes not as neutral scenery, but as charged environments shaped by memory, intervention, and time.

John Dewey is a painter whose work explores landscapes as layered records of memory, history, and human intervention through expressive, map-like compositions.

Working in oil with a distinctly layered, almost cartographic approach, Dewey compresses geography, history, and human systems into scenes that feel simultaneously observed and excavated. Nocturne, The Ghosts of the Owen’s Valley, and Green House each explore how land absorbs traces of human presence, sometimes subtly, sometimes violently, revealing landscapes as living records rather than passive backdrops.

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Nocturne, John Dewey, 2025, oil on canvas, 46 x 46 in. / 116.84 x 116.84 cm.

In Nocturne, darkness does not conceal so much as concentrate attention. The painting presents a rugged terrain rendered in deep, muted tones, interrupted by a single red circular mark that draws the eye inward. This gesture functions like a locator, suggesting surveillance, memory, or a moment of human focus imposed upon an otherwise indifferent landscape. Brushwork remains loose yet deliberate, allowing forms to shift between abstraction and recognition. The composition evokes the experience of scanning land at night, where meaning is fragmentary, and significance is assigned rather than inherent.

The Ghosts of the Owen's Valley, John Dewey, 2025, oil on canvas, 75 x 140 in. / 190.5 x 355.6 cm.

Expansiveness defines The Ghosts of the Owen’s Valley, where the panoramic format mirrors the scale of the land itself. Layers of mountains, clouds, and fragmented figures unfold across the surface, blending geological time with human narratives of displacement and labor. Rather than depicting a single event, the painting accumulates visual histories, suggesting that the valley is haunted not by specters but by the residue of extraction, settlement, and alteration. Dewey’s palette, dusty ochres, pale whites, and subdued greens, reinforces the sense of erosion, both physical and cultural.

Green House, John Dewey, 2025, oil on canvas, 96 x 72 in. / 243.84 x 182.88 cm.

In Green House, architecture becomes the focal point through which land and industry collide. An industrial structure sits above a cross-section of earth rendered in swirling, stratified layers, visually linking surface activity with what lies beneath. Satellite dishes and mechanical forms contrast with organic shapes, underscoring humanity’s tendency to occupy land while simultaneously penetrating it. The painting’s vertical composition emphasizes this relationship, framing the landscape as something built upon, monitored, and consumed, yet never fully controlled.

Taken together, these works articulate a central theme: landscapes as witnesses. Dewey presents land not as a romantic ideal, but as a repository of human ambition, anxiety, and consequence. Through layered paint and shifting perspectives, his paintings ask viewers to consider what remains embedded in the ground long after human attention has moved on, quietly asserting that every landscape remembers.

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