Eric Dever is a painter on Eastern Long Island—Water Mill, New York. Coupled with his studio garden, recent artist residencies, including the Warhol Foundation/Nature Conservancy-Montauk and Parrish Art Museum, have deepened his connection to the East Coast landscape. Born in Los Angeles. Dever earned his MA in painting at New York University/Steinhardt. He has exhibited throughout the United States, including the Art in Embassies program in Helsinki and Hong Kong/Macau. Collections include Grey Art Museum/NYU, The Heckscher Museum of Art, Parrish Art Museum, and Guild Hall Museum. Dever is represented by Berry Campbell. His fourth exhibition with the gallery, Points of Interest, was on view July/August 2025.
How has your background in California contributed to your artistic identity? I was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1962. Aerospace and the film industry, or Hollywood, were the chief employers in the region at this time. As a young student, I encountered the large-scale gestures and emotional immediacy of mid-century American painting, Abstract Expressionism. This exposure was never unanchored from the world and existed alongside my personal discovery of landscape, nature, and place. The physical expansiveness of the American West, its vast horizons and wildly diverse ecosystems, informed my visual imagination and vocabulary of reinvented and repurposed forms. Simultaneously, I was immersed in a cultural milieu where Japanese art, philosophy, and aesthetics were palpably present in museums and collections across California, which offered a different form of pictorial logic. Here, space was rendered as fluid, forms were outlined and hovered in negative space among asymmetric gestures.
— Mia Funk, The Creative Process
October 11, 2025
