Hayden Hays Gallery

Biography

Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Ed Mell became a highly recognized painter of stylized Southwest, panoramic landscapes. He was also a sculptor. His interest in illustration, initially auto design, led him to the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. After graduation in 1967, Ed Mell went to New York City and became art director of a large advertising agency, and two years later started his own company, Sagebrush Studios. His airbrush illustration technique, particularly use of angular forms inspired by art deco, achieved national recognition for him. However, he missed the open spaces of his native state. Summers of 1971 and 1973 spent on the Hopi Reservation convinced him to be a landscape painter in Arizona, and he returned to the state to live in 1973. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Southwest landscape painter Ed Mell makes his studio in a converted 1930s grocery store in the Coronado historic district of downtown Phoenix, just three blocks from the hospital where he was born in 1942. Hanging on the walls are works of by his favorite artists, including Maynard Dixon, whose cubic forms continue to be his main stylistic influence. Essentially an illustrator and commercial artist, Mell studied advertising and illustration at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. In 1967, Mell was employed as a junior art director at a major New York advertising firm. Leaving within a year, he and a friend opened their own illustration business in New York, with clients like Cheerios and RCA. Three years later, Mell taught art classes one summer on the Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona, awakening a desire to return to the state. He and his brother opened an illustration business in Phoenix, while he attempted to make fine art paintings in his spare time. While his paintings remain heavily planar, often employing theories of complimentary color, they were more minimal early on. He works from Maynard Dixon's Cubist stylistic concepts, sketches and photographs, often taking helicopter flights to photograph remote Arizona locations. Ed Mell comments, "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."