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It’s a memorial postage stamp, commemorating the centennial of Arizona statehood. It portrays Cathedral Rock near Sedona and is the work of My-West friend Ed Mell who also happens to be one of the most innovative and gifted western artists alive today.
The stamp was unveiled in Prescott this weekend as celebrations got underway leading up to Statehood Day on February 14, 2012…AKA Mom’s birthday. Governor Jan Brewer praised Mell’s effort as a “majestic work of art.”
And believe me, it was no fluke. Ed was one of the first painters we profiled on this site and his genius truly stirs my soul. Do yourself a favor and watch this short collage but breathe deeply beforehand because these images will take your breath away.
But long before Ford lionized these great icons of the southwest, paintings of the sweeping desert and colorful canyon country of Utah’s plateau province had captured the popular imagination of American and European audiences.
Vividly illustrated and exhaustively researched, “Painters of Utah’s Canyons and Deserts” is the first comprehensive history of the artists who painted Utah’s Red Rock with more than 300 paintings spanning 155 years of art.
The book explores the contrasts between painters who called Utah home and those who explored and visited. The book looks at lively anecdotes of the “artist as explorer,” including John Wesley Powell’s harrowing trip down the Colorado River, artist Solomon Nunes Carvalho’s recovery from the brink of starvation, and Richard Kern’s death at the hands of the Paiutes.
Love of the western landscape has to do with the capacity of the viewer to experience vast space. To appreciate the desert terrain, one has to be comfortable with an inscrutable universe. Whether existential or spiritual, these themes are evoked in the modern paintings of Ed Mell, Conrad Buff, Maynard Dixon, Gary E. Smith and many others.
Ed Mell is one of the most ingenious and successful artists working in the West today, but like most people, Mell’s career path wasn’t evident early on. After graduating, he moved to New York City to work as a graphic designer and within two years launched his own company, Sagebrush Studios, which became an immediate success with such well-known clients as Cheerios and RCA.
Ed Mell is represented by both the Overland Galery (in Scottsdale) and Medicine Man Gallery (in Tucson and Santa Fe). The above video was shot in Medicine Man Gallery.
Photograph of Gary E. Smith (standing) and Ed Mell. Courtesy of Larry Clarkson.
Preferring the West, Mell returned to his hometown, Phoenix, Arizona in 1973. He worked part time as an illustrator and part time developing his painting skills into what would become a unique and recognizable style. By 1978 he had become a full time artist creating paintings that moved between hard edged representation and much more abstract work; always with the familiar angles and edges. By choosing to paint a broken terrain, he has naturally cubed the landscape by dividing the images in his work into small multiple areas.
Mell told Southwest Art Magazine: “I work from nature, and sometimes I push it a little further…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.”
Like the Cubists, Mell has taken natural forms—clouds, sky, rain, lighting, cliffs, buttes and canyons—and ‘analyzed’ them for reinterpretation into geometric forms. His work also resonates with elements of chaos theory and the study of approximate fractals in which patterns in nature appear identical at different scales; the repeating motifs are easily found in natural formations such as clouds, mountain ranges, lightning and river networks.
Fractals seem more evident, more repetitive in a cubist interpretation of nature. In both Wingate Cliffs and Canyon, Light and Rain the canyons and bluffs are often connected by long cylinders representing shafts of light, rain or lightning—emphasizing the interconnection of the elements.
“…there are certain moods to the landscape, and sometimes that’s the main focus, to capture the mood rather than an actual depiction of [a place]…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.”
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 10:16PM Tweet 
Credit: newstucson
Credit: Ktar
