Vermilion cliffs, sculptural clouds, incandescent sunsets, jagged mountains, thunder-gray storms — Ed Mell’s paintings portray and celebrate the majesty of the desert Southwest. “I work from nature,” the artist says of his creative process. “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.”
Ed Mell’s work has found homes in many private collections, including those of Tri-Star Pictures, Diane Keaton, and Arnold Schwarzenegger; as well as the public art collections of Glendale, Arizona, and Scottsdale, Arizona. He has exhibited in across the United States in places like the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, the Rockwell-Corning Museum of Modern Art, and the Booth Museum of Western Art. In Arizona, his work is in the permanent collections of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Tucson Museum of Art, and the Desert Caballeros Western Museum.
Mell is represented by Owings Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, Arizona; Ed Mell Gallery, Phoenix, Arizona.
Featured image: Camelback Evening © Ed Mell
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Comments
Same painting, 2 different titles. Somebody goofed.
Desert Light / Into the Canyon.
Thank you so much for this feature highlighting Mr. Mell’s brilliant works of the American West. I regret to say that I was not familiar with him or his works previously, but am now because of The Saturday Evening Post. One observation I’ve made going through this gallery in addition to those made here in the first paragraph, is the strong influence of Art Deco; at least to my eyes.
In particular ‘Cascading Canyon Storm’, ‘Single Strike’, ‘Mexican Desert Rose’, ‘Desert Light’ and ‘Into the Canyon’. It’s unusual and unique too in that we associate Art Deco with buildings and the style and influence with physical objects, but not so much actual paintings. It’s one of my most favorite styles along with ‘Googie’ which was kind of the Jet-Age mid-century successor to Art Deco, but that’s for another time.
I’d love to get some reasonably priced prints of some of these for my condo walls. I’m perfectly happy with beautiful prints. Arnold’s got the money for the originals, and that’s fine. He’s got excellent taste in art!