Beyond the Visible Terrain: The Art of Ed Mell

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Summary: Enhanced with insightful commentary on Ed Mell's life
Review: Beyond The Visible Terrain: The Art Of Ed Mell will introduce the art student to one of America's best and most innovative contemporary painters of the American Southwest. This compendium of Mell's visions of the landscape, flora and fauna, and people of the Colorado Plateau evoke both an esthetic and an emotional response that make him one of the most popular artists with some of his canvases being translated into limited edition lithographs and quality posters. Enhanced with insightful commentary on Ed Mell's life and work by Donald Hagerty, Beyond The Visible Terrain is a remarkable, beautiful, enduring testament to a uniquely talented artist -- and would grace any individual, academic, or community library art history collection.

Rating:
Summary: The Art Does the Talking
Review: This book is a wonderful, simple monograph of the vibrant art of an artist who is inspired by the United States' most distinctive terrain. Ed Mell delights in the natural color of the Southwest, and exploits and manipulates it with high-key oil hues that span the available spectrum of color. Subtly he mixes razor-sharp, jagged regions of color in a painting with diffuse, soft blends that draw the eye in pulses throughout each painting. The color contrast in each painting is dramatic and complex, as it is required to be in any successful painting. The book is simply a succession of highly accurate color reproductions of these masterpieces in roughly chronological order of their creation. It is accompanied by a straightforward, well-written biography of the Southwest-born artist, who began his career oddly enough in New York in the early '70s. The biography is put entirely in the beginning of the book, which allows the art to possess full textless pages afterward. The biography sheds much anecdotal light on the development and expansion of Mell's style. Were it not for th is information, the change and progression of Mell's style is revealed eloquently anyway in the art's chronological presentation, from Mell's idealistic geometric reductions in the late '70s to the highly developed, jag-edged style that made his reputation in the '80s to the wider subject matter and more nuanced rendering of paint that marked his paintings of the last decade. The book is a treat for the eyes from beginning to end, even and maybe especially if you are sick to death of "Southwest Art". Open it up to any page, set it up on a bookshelf to any page at eye level, and light it well. Then keep it there for at least a week before changing the page. This is bold, honest representational work that carries America's landscape tradition into the 21st century.

Rating:
Summary: The Art Does the Talking
Review: This book is a wonderful, simple monograph of the vibrant art of an artist who is inspired by the United States' most distinctive terrain. Ed Mell delights in the natural color of the Southwest, and exploits and manipulates it with high-key oil hues that span the available spectrum of color. Subtly he mixes razor-sharp, jagged regions of color in a painting with diffuse, soft blends that draw the eye in pulses throughout each painting. The color contrast in each painting is dramatic and complex, as it is required to be in any successful painting. The book is simply a succession of highly accurate color reproductions of these masterpieces in roughly chronological order of their creation. It is accompanied by a straightforward, well-written biography of the Southwest-born artist, who began his career oddly enough in New York in the early '70s. The biography is put entirely in the beginning of the book, which allows the art to possess full textless pages afterward. The biography sheds much anecdotal light on the development and expansion of Mell's style. Were it not for th is information, the change and progression of Mell's style is revealed eloquently anyway in the art's chronological presentation, from Mell's idealistic geometric reductions in the late '70s to the highly developed, jag-edged style that made his reputation in the '80s to the wider subject matter and more nuanced rendering of paint that marked his paintings of the last decade. The book is a treat for the eyes from beginning to end, even and maybe especially if you are sick to death of "Southwest Art". Open it up to any page, set it up on a bookshelf to any page at eye level, and light it well. Then keep it there for at least a week before changing the page. This is bold, honest representational work that carries America's landscape tradition into the 21st century.

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Summary: Southwestern landscapes seen by helicopter
Review: This book of painter Ed Mell's desert landscapes (also flowers, cattle, and cowboys) is a very satisfying survey of his career from the 1970s to 1990s. It illustrates his evolution from minimalist to representative styles, rich with strong colors, his latter works revealing a masterful grasp of space and light. Unlike painters like Maynard Dixon, who loved to work directly in remote locations on the Colorado Plateau, Mell works in his Phoenix studio. To capture the look and feel of his desert vistas, he uses photography from the vantage point of a helicopter. The resulting paintings are imaginative composites of the land forms and clouds recorded on film, and the above-ground perspective heightens awareness of depth, space, distances and the curvature of the earth.

As of this writing, Hagerty's book is out of print (he has also written a biography of Maynard Dixon, "Desert Dreams"). If you can acquire a copy, it will reward you with 100 pages of vivid reproductions, including photographs of Mell's whimsical cowboy sculpture, "Jack Knife" and "Diggin' In." Hagerty shows how Mell works, illustrating the stages of a painting's development. There is also a chapter-length biography of the artist, with family snapshots and a few examples of his early commercial work.

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Summary: Ed Mell captures the desolate beauty of the desert southwest
Review: This is an amazing, colorful book full of the beauty of the desert southwest. A very generous sized book shows the detail and the colors that you cannot find in any other area in the world. Those who are not familiar with the desert southwest and Mell will see an artist who's color pallet is similar to the French Impressionists.