Dessner wanted viewers to have a visceral response to his paintings. Poured Orange Blue offers an expansive, indeterminate space built from a rainbow of colors, with seemingly atmospheric fluctuations of matter and light. The artist mixed his own paint, combining powdered pigments with buckets of latex media, and poured thick layers onto large canvases spread across his studio floor. Edges seem barely to contain the whirling colors as they flow, cloud-like, across the canvas. Dessner described being inspired Venetian painters such as Titian and Veronese, whose works glow with warm light, and by the brilliant light of Patmos, Greece—the site of John the Evangelist’s Revelations, which were suffused with clouds, rainbows, gemstones, and other elements.
Born and raised in South Philadelphia, Dessner began making art at the Fleisher Art Memorial and graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where he later taught painting and drawing for more than forty years. A recipient of PAFA’s Cresson Travel Scholarship and Scheidt Prize, Dessner studied the old masters in Europe before returning to Philadelphia. Over his career, he exhibited widely, with more than twenty solo shows and work now held in the collections of Woodmere, PAFA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bryn Mawr College, Colgate University, Villanova University, and other university collections nationwide.
