ABOUT

Ckaz Dean was born and raised in the Greater Manila Area of the Philippines to a civil engineer father and an architect mother.  As a child, she spent hours illustrating short stories on the back of discarded blueprints that her mother would take home from work.  Her ambition was to become an architect like her mother, but financial hardship got in the way of her following her dream and she took a different path.  Letting go of this dream was the most painful thing she had experienced at this point in her life.  However, she always found ways to express her creativity.  In her college years, she created decorations for church dances and college performances and made posters for church and community events.  After college, she served as a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  During her mission she designed team t-shirts for every area she was assigned in and drew several cartoons in her weekly reports to the Mission President, who, after finishing her mission, helped her start her own t-shirt business incorporating her original drawings and designs.  

Later in life, when her daughter was in middle school Ckaz not only created an after-school drama club but also designed and taught her students how to build all of the sets and major props for its productions.   When her daughter entered high school, Ckaz decided to go back to school to take Web Design.  One of the required classes was Drawing, where she discovered two things.  (1) She knew how to draw realistically, and (2) She truly enjoyed it. How exhilarating it was to rekindle a passion once lost!  This new discovery not only brought joy and fulfillment to her but wonder and excitement to the people she most love.  To further pursue this new-found skill, she decided to enroll as a Fine Arts student at Dixie State University, taking classes from world-renowned religious painter, Del Parson, who has been mentoring her in charcoal, pastels, and oil.  In addition to his influence on her development as an artist, she has enjoyed collaborating with other art students, benefitting from their experience and perspective while sharing her own in turn.  Under the combined influence of her teachers and fellow students who have become strong friends, her talents have evolved and progressed to the point that she has begun thinking of how to use her creative talents on a broader scale. While her talents have long been appreciated by friends and family she now hopes to have her art seen and enjoyed by a much wider audience. 

Ckaz’s preferred mediums are charcoal and oil.  She is deeply inspired by works of the great masters, the likes of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jan Van Huysum, William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and attempts to create as much detail and realism in her pieces as possible.  Ckaz hopes that in this way her viewers might have a more intimate feel for people and objects from which they are far-removed in both time and place as to experience the same emotions she had upon seeing these subjects for the first time.   Her attention to detail goes far beyond capturing merely color and shape, but also the smallest detail—the enchanting creases of a flower petal, the stitching on the seam of a denim jacket, the reflections dancing on glass surfaces, wavy locks of hair or the glint in a joyful smile.  In her portraits, she aspires to create the most accurate likeness possible in order to capture the subject’s personality and character traits that are most endearing to those who know them, that these portraits might act as remembrances bringing them peace and comfort.