In 1916, in a snow-lined canyon in Nevada, a stagecoach robbery took place that, when it was all said and done, involved one stagecoach driver (dead), three murderers (apprehended) and $4,000 in stolen money (never found). It was the last stagecoach robbery ever committed in the United States. Though it likely ended long before this event, now there was no doubt: the Wild West was over.
Clouds Drifting North, Vermillion Cliffs, oil on linen, 20 x 40”
Law and order, barb wire, train tracks, statehood, telephone lines, automobiles—the Old West simply became the West, and that spirit of adventure, of exploration, of wonder, it all was tied neatly to the past as the country grew, modernized and made cultural leaps into the 20th century. For many artists, though, the West still had a mesmerizing presence in their imaginations. The West was escape. It was a rebirth. It was a second chance. It was a place to plant a flag.
Entering Storm, Grand Canyon, 2019, oil on linen, 15 x 30”
For Ed Mell, it was an awakening. “I’ve always thought of the West as the frontier, even still today. When I came out here it felt like I could do anything. When I was working in New York City, it was all built up and there was nowhere left to go,” he says. “But out here you could reinvent yourself and make something cool out of it all.”
Mell, who was born in Phoenix, had gone to New York City to work as an art director and illustrator, eventually producing work for National Lampoon and Esquire magazines and companies such as Air France and Fabergé. But the desert called to him. In 1971 he took a job teaching at Third Mesa on the Hopi Reservation in Northern Arizona. When the teaching job ended he went back to New York City, but returned to the Grand Canyon State not long after. The rest of the story is picked up in Mell’s first museum retrospective, Ed Mell’s Southwest: Five Decades, opening December 21 at Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg, Arizona. The museum will also honor Mell with the Lifetime Achievement Award January 18, 2020, at the heART of the West Gala. The retrospective exhibition will include some of his earliest modernist paintings, as well as his rarer representational works. The stars of the show, though, will be his famous abstracted landscapes, for which Mell is widely known.
Two Petunias, 1990, oil on canvas, 72 x 52”
“It starts from my earliest paintings after transitioning from commercial art and illustration. I started out as a very minimal and modern artist, eventually evolving to more realism. And after doing that for a bitI went back and started revisiting modernism,” he says. “I’m glad that I had learned to paint the landscape realistically because it helped when I turned to abstractions. People think that artists like Picasso started out with abstraction, but understanding the human form and how to paint these other subjects is immensely important when it comes to abstraction.I certainly learned that with the landscape.”
Southern Arizona Longhorn Study, 1992, oil on linen, 18 x 24”
Works in the retrospective, many from Mell’s own collection, include Entering Storm, Grand Canyon and Sunlit Thunderhead, both of which exemplify his style: vivid desert color, abstracted cloud and land forms, geometric design that favors straight lines and angles, and a reverence for the desert and its unmistakable power. In other works, such as Upheaval and Sands of Time II, Mell pulls out all the stops and brings Western landscapes right to the brink of complete abstraction, with form and color pushing his style into a genre unto itself.
Sunset Storm, 1985, oil on linen, 36 x 84”. Collection of Mark and Kathleen Sublette.
In addition to several key florals—including the magnificent Two Petunias, a transcending work that both sings out to Georgia O’Keeffe and lays down a unique path for Mell—the retrospective will begin to scratch the surface on the artist’s vital role to the arts in Arizona, and on Arizona’s behalf. For starters: Mell is a frequent contributor to Arizona Highways magazine; he’s painted theater elements for the stage production of Riders of the Purple Sage; his paintings of the Grand Canyon, Kartchner Caverns and Monument Valley have become icons to these landmarks; his Jacknife bronze monument is an anchor point for the entire arts district in Scottsdale; and, in 2012, he was asked to design a stamp for Arizona’s centennial celebration. All of these aspects of his career will be represented in the retrospective in some way.
Sunlit Thunderhead, 1998, oil on linen, 25 x 19”
“Altogether there will be 75 paintings—including oil pieces as well as works on paper and pastel pieces—and eight bronzes, as well as lots of little different things, like the original blueprints for Jacknife and some other materials,” says the artist, whose works have also been collected by notable names such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Diane Keaton and Erma Bombeck. “It’s been fun going through everything I want to send them, as well as works from some of my best collectors. I’m also happy to show many of the more realistic pieces, many of which are in my own collection.”
What unites the work, though, as well as Mell’s own interests, is his fascination with modern design. Just look at his life: His cars are magnificent, including a 1962 Corvette and a 1972 DeTomaso Pantera, both of which he proudly shows off when visiting his gallery, itself a renovated grocery store from the 1930s. His Phoenix home is designed by Southwest architect Benny Gonzales, who designed the Heard Museum and Scottsdale City Hall. He’s filled his home with artwork by modernists, prominent Southwest painters and midcentury illustrators such as R.G. Harris and Maynard Dixon. In a November group show at his Phoenix gallery, he presented work by muralists, graffiti artists and ceramicists.
Many still think the West is cowboy hats and boots with spurs, but if you view the West through the prism of Mell and his interests, it turns into something unexpected. He surrounds himself not just with fine art, but fine design, especially design that is forward-thinking in composition, function or presence. And Mell’s work shares many of those principles. He takes very basic Southwestern ideas—sunset vistas, rocky buttes, desert thunderstorms, canyon walls—and renders them in a way that acknowledges the wonderful history of desert landscape painting, but also pushes the genre forward into the future with a modern design aesthetic.
Ed Mell in his Phoenix studio. Photo courtesy Erik Petersen.
“I do think about design a lot, which is why artists like Benny Gonzales and Frank Lloyd Wright interest me so much. I love artists who have their own vision and can act on it, which you can certainly see with Frank Lloyd Wright when you live in the Phoenix area,” Mell says. “For me design really comes into the compositions. One of the first things I learned about painting was to not make it too obvious. That’s the underbelly of a good painting. After that there are many ways to get the point across, and design is one of them. And
I certainly have a design aesthetic I look for. When I’m picking out a car it better be damn good looking, more than any other qualities. With our home we wanted something very unique and luckily we found it.”
He continues, “But I do love old stuff. My heroes are artists from the past; artists of all kinds, including all the great modernists. They inspire me and push me forward.” —
Ed Mell’s Southwest: Five Decades
December 21, 2019 - March 8, 2020
Desert Caballeros Western Museum,
21 North Frontier Street, Wickenburg, AZ 85390
(928) 684-2272, www.westernmuseum.org
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