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Mike Dewey: The Art of Observation

Climber, artist and Alpinist contributing illustrator Mike Dewey spent the mid- to late 1990s living and working seasonally in Yosemite Valley and the Sierra High Country. During these years, in addition to climbing boulders, routes and big walls, he sketched and painted scenes of friends and scenery in his notepad. He also studied computer programming at Harvard University.

Today, Dewey lives in Oakland, California, with his wife Maggie and their two children Bodhi and Lupin, making a living as an engineer at a huge online social network for art called DeviantArt. Dewey’s work has appeared in Alpinist 40, 46, 48, and he has a piece in the works for an upcoming issue. He continues to climb rocks and expand his art, combining paint programs he’s helped build with acrylics. He works with a variety of contemporary styles including impressionism and street art. He also carves stone sculptures.

In the following pages Dewey walks us through some of his work.

–Chris Van Leuven

[Photo] Axel Hermann

[Redraw] Mike Dewey

For my job I created a drawing program, and I regularly need to make digital paintings to test out one feature or another. I painted this while working on a “redraw” feature to replay everything that went on in the program while the artist was creating the piece. I made this thinking it would be “performance art,” and made in few enough strokes to keep a viewer’s interest.

[Sculpture] Mike Dewey

Sculpture makes stone seem to come to life, and it just seems natural that it would turn into a climber.

[Painting] Mike Dewey

I did a series of paintings made on playing cards. I spent hours by Tenaya Lake painting with little brushes that have something like five hairs on them. I made this portrait of Zack Smith just after we had rapped into the top of Freerider (VI 5.12d) to work some of the pitches. I’ve climbed El Cap a number of times and never had a problem with the exposure, but going from flat ground to 3,000 feet of exposure all in one second as you rap over the edge turned out to be way scarier than I was expecting. I don’t know if Zack was gripped too, or just empathizing with me, but this is the look he shot me when he clipped into the Mini Traxion that was looking oh-so-small at the time.

[Painting] Mike Dewey

I drew this in my sketchbook the first time I visited Zion. At the time I was really interested in street art, though I felt that watercolor landscapes fit my personality more than spray-painted letters. I was trying to get an urban feel but still capture the natural beauty of Zion’s landscape.

[Painting] Mike Dewey

A friend had just bought his first house, and he asked me to make a painting for him. I was living in a friend’s windowless basement at the time. Your psyche does weird things when you move from sleeping under the stars in a meadow to a basement, so it seemed fitting to me to do most of the painting with a spoon instead of a brush. I guess that this was different enough from what my friend was expecting that he never picked it up. Years later I’m still not sure if I love it or hate it.

[Painting] Mike Dewey

I feel like the best part of climbing is the friends that you make through it. Robert “Derci” [short for Arrivederci-Ed.] Newsom is a great friend, and one of the best partners you could ask for. This was painted from a picture taken while stopping for a long break just a hundred feet from the top of Mt. Whitney.

[Painting] Mike Dewey

I’ve spent many summers in Yosemite, and I would not give up those memories for anything in the world. The summer of 2005 in Tuolumne was particularly magical though. The season ended, they took down the store and tents, and all my partners migrated down to the Valley. But I refused to admit that the summer was over. This painting is a farewell to another season in Tuolumne. Mostly I just remember that my fingers were painfully cold when I made it.

[Photo] Axel Hermann

Did you ever wait on a ledge with the haulbags while your partners say they will climb a couple pitches and then do one really long haul? It seems like the rope hasn’t moved in forever, so you start making a drawing of the Cathedrals. The rope still doesn’t seem to be moving, and you start to get worried that maybe they’re stuck on some horrendously hard pitch. Then you discover that they saw a shady ledge off to the side, so they rapped down to it and are taking a nap.