Painting in a vacuum
Artist Paul Mullins walks the line between the abstract and the straightforward at Ojai’s Nathan Lar
By Marissa Landrigan 09/13/2007
The only hint of any human is the glimpse of a few fingertips tenderly gripping a fish in the painting “Big ‘Un.” Yet the idea of man is ever-present, both in the subject matter and technique of Some Other Day in the Garden, the new collection of work by San Francisco-based artist Paul Mullins at the Nathan Larramendy Gallery in Ojai. “Sad dog” portraits, fish and opossums flipping off the viewer dot the walls, but the messy rawness of Mullins’ paintings and sketches evoke the tender line masculinity walks between love and viciousness.
Born and raised in Charleston, W. Va., Mullins, who is assistant professor of art at San Francisco State University, has always been fascinated by the stereotypes and realties of life in Appalachia, at times playfully hinting at bestiality or evoking the utter sadness of mountain poverty. As Mullins himself claims, he is an artist haunted by his own past, and constantly negotiating with it through his art: “I frequently employ images (and often text) that recall my Appalachian youth, the redneck ideal of masculinity as well as the sorrow of rural poverty and callowness.”
Much of Mullins’ past work, which has been exhibited in solo shows at Lyonsweir Gallery in New York and the Corcoran in Washington, D.C., has focused on the human, from muscle cars and their beaming owners to headless amateur boxers or the disembodied heads of smiling cowboys — subjects designed to more overtly address the ideas of the good-ol’-boy mentality and its pitfalls. The work currently displayed at the Nathan Larramendy gallery explores similar ideas, but does so without the presence of any male or female figure. Instead, Mullins has chosen to exclusively represent the animal aspect of rural life, from the newly dead food to the good buddy, illuminating the everyday. The absence of man is contrasted sharply with the reminder of man — desperate dogs peer out from a cloud of blue, begging “Anything for You Baby” to their unseen owners, and fish bleed at the hands of absent fishermen.
The sincerity of Mullins’ work is that he is both fiercely defensive and playfully derisive of these ideas, and his work expands upon itself with this constantly shifting perspective. His large-scale painting “Catch” depicts an enormous pile of wriggling, newly dead fish, a portrait of pride and suffering, strange and otherworldly, while the more straightforward “Big ‘Un” is a simple presentation of a single fish, stiff and real. Mullins is comfortable oscillating between the abstract and the everyday to better exemplify the conflict between the ideal and the harsh realities of the lives he paints.
Mullins’ color and texture choices seem to reflect this idea of ideas: the images seem to be disembodiments of themselves. “Catch” swirls in large, dripping splashes of pale pink, a pile of squirming fish floating in nothing; in all the paintings, the subjects leap from the canvas, with no realistic background imagery, as if removed from their natural surroundings and presented to us in a vacuum, so that we may better examine the truths they have to offer.
In addition, Mullins is more than willing to allow us a glimpse into his process; “Closer to the Heart” leaves the legs of a dog unpainted but outlined, and other pieces have scribbled out or erased pencil sketches or phrases not painted over. These hints at imperfection also contribute to the overwhelming sense that the viewer is seeing an abstract interpretation of a dog, or the idea of a fish, rather than a fish itself. Mullins, speaking of his craft, says, “I want to balance the elegant with the vulgar, and I often combine an old-master drawing look with the most crass of contemporary images.”
The paper sketches that accompany Mullins’ lush and large-scale paintings seem to indicate a more simplistic approach to this idealized country lifestyle. Presenting to his viewers both the original sketches of displayed paintings as well as sketches which seemed to go no further, Mullins reminds us that, despite the ethereal or ghostly appeal of his paintings, we are still looking at nothing more than a fish.
This is the ultimate paradox of Mullins’ art: By elevating uncomplicated vignettes to conceptual examinations of the dueling ideals and stereotypes of rural poverty, he reminds us of the reality of that life. So when you find yourself drifting too far into the gaping mouth and bared teeth of a floating pitbull, turn to the simple pencil sketch of a pitbull and remind yourself that truth is a shapeless entity, and takes many forms.
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