Spring

Spring belongs to Dennis's intermittent landscape work, and as a seasonal title it likely depicts a Pacific Northwest scene at its early-year transition: bare or budding deciduous trees against evergreen, hillsides emerging from winter, a low farm building or edge of town set in a freshly green field. Dennis approached landscape with the same planar method he used for vehicles and architecture, building the image from broad areas of flat color cut from a relief block and separated by strong contour, with grain texture often allowed to read through ground areas as a kind of natural tone. Within his wider practice, seasonal landscape titles align him with a long Japanese tradition of seasonal markers in print, while the specific subject would be local — a Northwest spring rather than a generic one. The 1989 date sets it at the close of a productive late-1980s run in which his urban, industrial, and rural subjects were treated as a single integrated picture of place.