“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, July 11, 2013

Roger Dean versus James Cameron

Avatar may have been his "most personal film to date" (as he says) but part of that may well have been having very personal connections in the early seventies to the Yes album art of Roger Dean, who is now suing for copyright infringement. How hard would it have been to get Dean involved from the start in any case?

This is the art from the cover of An Evening of Yes Music Plus for instance. Erm...

And the whole theme of a fragile planet. One assumes he dug Olias of Sunhillow, Jon Anderson's solo album based on Dean's paintings. For heaven's sake.

Roger I'll be happy to testify mate if you are reading this. Thank you Gerry Canavan for this. Fairly shortly my essay on Avatar will be published (thanks again Gerry) in which the resemblance (more than that even) is noted. And there's this.




2 comments:

Bill Benzon said...

Well, then there's Hayao Miyazaki, whose Castle in the Sky does the flying worlds thing and whose Princess Mononoke does the glowing sacred world thing.

Henry Warwick said...

So, like _FOUR YEARS AGO_ I wrote an article on how James Cameron's "Avatar" basically copped a lot of its vision from Roger Dean's album cover art from the early 1970s (as well as a big fat blast from Myazaki's films and the film Silent Running). You can read my article here:
http://henrywarwick.com/blog/2009/12/31/avatar/
Well, GUESS WHAT? Last week Roger Dean sued James Cameron for, well, basically ***everything I pointed out four years ago.***
What I wanna know is:
1. What the hell took Roger Dean so freakin' long to puzzle that out? and
2. Since when is a painting style or an approach to imagery property? Sigh.
Braque should have sued Picasso. Duchamp should have sued Picasso. Everyone should have sued Picasso.
Cameron obviously copped a huge chunk of Dean's imagination from early Yes albums (maybe while doing bong hits back in University while listening to Demons & Wizards by Uriah Heep, or maybe Fragile by Yes) so who knows where this lawsuit by Dean will go. Four years ago. I feel like a PROPHET!!!
:-)