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In an Ed Mell
painting, cotton-ball clouds and rocky mountains often undergo a
metamorphosis, becoming simplified forms with knife-sharp edges.
A rose or a cactus bloom may take on a colossal scale, with crystalline
petals resembling shards of stained glass. Pink buttes may be rendered
as a deep coral rose, and blue-gray rain may appear as blue as sapphires.
By deviating from reality, Mell succeeds in creating a feeling that
is closer to the actual experience of witnessing nature first-hand
than any photograph.
"I work from nature, and sometimes I push it a little further,"
Mell says. "Seeing the real thing has much more impact than
a photographic representation of nature, so in order to duplicate
nature, I like to push it a little further and bring back some of
the impact that nature has in real life."
The Southwest lends itself particularly well to Mell's approach,
since the region is renowned for dramatic sunsets and storms that
can deliver dazzling light shows. Some of the Arizona artist's canvases
depict recognizable sites such as the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley,
and Lake Powell, while others are only loosely inspired by actual
locations. Of the latter, Mell says they are invented from fantasy,
mood, vague recollections, and impressions that come from the visual
storehouse of images he has absorbed through the years.
"There are certain moods to the landscape, and sometimes that's
the main focus, to capture a mood rather than an actual depiction
of [a place]," he says. "A lot of my more abstracted landscapes
just kind of invent themselves as they go. Sometimes they're based
on a sketch, or sometimes I'll just sit down and put a few lines
on a board and let them suggest something and see where it goes.
Some kind of invention happens, almost like auto-painting, but in
a calculated way. Once you have enough confidence that you're not
nervous about where it will go, you can have freedom and fun with
it."
Mell's habit of embracing variety in his style, subjects, and media
keeps him fresh and challenged. Stylistically, he moves fluidly
between the polar opposites of realism and abstraction, but never
goes completely in either direction. One of the distinctive qualities
in Mell's work is that he distills the complexities of nature into
essential geometric forms-to a greater or lesser degree depending
on the painting. On the other hand, no matter how abstracted, his
subjects always remain recognizable. Mell's subject matter mainly
consists of landscapes and florals, but the artist also paints cattle,
horses, and cowboys on occasion. And though oil painting is his
primary medium, he has been sculpting since the mid-1980s. In 1993
he completed Jack Knife, a monumental sculpture of a cowboy on a
bucking bronco that now greets visitors to downtown Scottsdale,
AZ. Currently Mell is working on another major public project, a
40-inch bronze sculpture of the mythical phoenix bird for the Phoenix
Sister Cities Commission.
Besides finding variety enjoyable, Mell makes use of it to generate
a visual dialogue in which he can explore ideas that will surface
later in another style, subject or medium. For instance, many of
the artist's friends thought his paintings of flowers-which started
in 1988 with a batch of pink gladiolas from a local nursery-were
a fleeting diversion. However, Mell continued painting them, and
a rainbow array of roses and crimson and yellow cactus blooms now
thrive in his studio. The floral paintings are an important focus
of his work and have cross-pollinated ideas by introducing a new
palette of colors into his landscapes.
Mell makes reference to the floral and landscape palettes in a separate
discussion of the translucency and the inner glow that are trademarks
of his paintings. "Contrasts are what make things come alive,"
Mell says. "For example, if you do a yellow flower and you
put in a dark purple background, which is the opposite on the color
wheel, that color makes the yellow come alive more than any other
color. Plus, you're dealing with light that illuminates the flower.
So you have two things going for you to create a glow."
Several of his landscapes, likewise, have deep purple clouds against
patches of mustard yellow sky. "I just sort of invented this
color scheme, but I'm sure it's out there," he says. "I
don't recall ever seeing a purple sky like that, but then again,
you've got this purple against this yellow and it kind of makes
it work. And you can tell it is casting purple light on the land."
Mell makes his studio in a converted 1930s-era grocery store in
the Coronado historic district of downtown Phoenix, just three blocks
away from the hospital where he was born in 1942. The studio reflects
the artist's varied interests and his penchant for collecting. Hanging
on the walls are a sampling of works by his favorite painters, including
Maynard Dixon, Alonzo "Lon" Megargee, Thomas Hart Benton,
Frank Tenney Johnson, Jimmy Swinnerton and Richard Lillis. Visitors
entering through the back door of the studio first encounter a gleaming
black 1936 DeSoto Airflow coupe. He also owns a 1962 Corvette, which
he drives every year in the Phoenix Art Museum's road rally fund-raiser.
Automobiles have been a passion all his life. Mell's boyhood hobby
was building model cars and doing pencil and watercolor sketches
of cars, which led to drawings of other subjects. After high school,
he studied advertising and illustration at the Art Center College
of Design in Los Angeles. In 1967, Mell accepted a job as a junior
art director at a major New York advertising firm, but within a
year he became disillusioned, feeling his creativity was being smothered.
He and a friend opened their own illustration firm in New York and
became very successful, with clients of the caliber of Cheerios
and RCA. Even so, three years later, Mell still found life as a
New York illustrator to be repetitious and unfulfilling.
"I saw those guys living the dream, but it wasn't my dream,"
he says. "It was a great education, but it wasn't where I wanted
to stay." Mell accepted an offer to teach art classes one summer
on the Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona, and the experience
awakened a yearning to return to his roots. "Looking at the
landscape with a fresh eye, all of a sudden there seemed to be a
real magic to it," he recalls. "You have to go away sometimes
to be able to appreciate it."
Mell and his younger brother opened their own illustration business
in Phoenix, but it wasn't long before the fine-art painting Mell
was doing in his spare time evolved into a full-time occupation.
Initially, Mell took an extremely minimal, almost reductive, approach
to the landscape, paring it down to its basic forms and colors.
Exploring geometry and angles enabled Mell to invent a fresh approach
to capturing the strength and the dynamics of the Arizona landscape.
After a time, Mell found himself exploring form and light, and his
paintings became less a conceptual statement and more a response
to nature. They became naturalistic but still retained a crisp angularity
in their forms. Eventually Mell found himself revisiting his first,
more abstracted, approach. Since then, he has moved back and forth
between the poles of realism and abstraction.
The artist explores the Southwest with camera and sketchpad in hand
but says he finds ideas wherever he goes, even on his own doorstep.
Although Mell prefers hotels to camping out, he does do some hiking
and travels to scenic spots by car. Each year he joins painters
Gary Ernest Smith and Larry Clarkson on a plein-air painting trip
into Capitol Reef National Monument, and he has taken about 40 helicopter
trips to explore the more remote scenic wonders of Arizona. "To
me, it's fun to find sights that aren't accessible any other way
than by air," Mell says.
Currently the artist is preparing for a desert flora-themed solo
show in November at Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, AZ, followed
by his annual exhibition in March at Overland Gallery in Scottsdale.
In 1996 his career was the subject of a book, Beyond the Visible
Terrain: The Art of Ed Mell by Donald J. Hagerty. His works are
represented in the collections of the Phoenix Art Museum, the Eiteljorg
Museum of American Indians and Western Art, and Tri-Star Pictures,
and in the private collections of Bruce Babbitt, Arnold Schwarzenegger,
and others.
"There's always another level of recognition out there, but
to me, painting is not so much about recognition as it is about
doing the best work you can," Mell says. "It's great to
be appreciated, but it is more important to be happy with what you're
doing."
Lynn Pyne Davis
wrote about Arizona Regionalists in the September issue.
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