Yes, Relayer/The Gates of Delirium, 2019

Relayer is one of the most iconic of the YES album designs and has appeared high up on many lists for "Best Album Cover" on par with Tales from Topographic Oceans. Roger has often said that "The Gates of Delerium" together with "Soon," a section of the piece, is his favourite YES track.

He has also said that he felt that "The Gates of Delerium" would have made a much better title for both the album and the painting than "Relayer", having both a far greater resonance and relevance. Relayer has always been one of his favourite paintings and together with Asia's Alpha, represented the high point of his "drawn" works on stretched paper before he changed his technique for major colored pieces by painting directly on (usually linen) canvas.

This was painted at a time when the expectation was for Roger to paint in ever more vivid colours and this, a drawing tinted with watercolour in little more than the water used to rinse the brush, was in sharp contrast to that notion.

The energy of the painting is conveyed in the swirling forms of the huge gothic structures with the snakes adding a fluid coda of their own. Roger has very often created creatures that are made up entirely from elements of nature, such as the Dragonflies in the Yes "Chop Logo" pieces. These were produced as an accurate black & white drawing, but the wing markings came from moths and two of the versions used the colouring from tropical fresh water fish.

With this in mind, Roger has long held a wish to revisit the "natural history" of the two snakes in this piece, and making this print gave him that opportunity. The new versions are based largeley on rattlesnakes, especially the horns over the eyes, yet he did not include the very dramatic keeled scales of this species, wanting something sleeker. So the patterns and the smoother scales are from the viper family, and the spine is from a fish!

Release Notes:
The print is a combination of elements from the original painting completed in 1974 and the new painting completed in October, 2019, and has been produced with a mix of archival pigment print and serigraph printing techniques. This print was published in 2019.

Collector's Notes:
Roger Dean's fine-art limited edition prints were produced in the UK under his direct supervision. Each piece is hand-signed, titled, and numbered by Roger. On-site inventory varies, so artworks may ship from San Francisco or the UK, please allow 2-4 weeks for delivery. 

Buyers will receive a certificate of authenticity following delivery. Please contact us with any questions!