Finding Inspiration in the Clouds
Artist Ed Mell’s cabin retreat near Prescott, Arizona.
By: Candy Moulton 02/01/2009
While Mell began his art career as an illustrator in New York (having earned degrees from Phoenix Junior College in Arizona and the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, California), he left that rat race for a summer teaching silk screening and drawing on the Hopi Reservation at Hotevilla, Arizona, and quickly decided New York would be part of his past. So he returned to Phoenix and began an illustration business with his younger brother, but he soon found himself using his colored pencils to sketch landscapes. Since 1978, he has concentrated on oil paintings, and while his landscapes are signature, he has also painted other Southwestern subjects: cactus, cowboys, cattle and horses. He has sculpted in bronze, retaining sharp corners in the hard medium, such as in his rendition of a bucking bronc and rider, Jackknife.
Just as Ed Mell spent time at his grandfather’s home in this area, so too, does his own family come to visit him at the family cabin. He’s invited artist friends as well, including his former studio partner, True West Executive Editor Bob Boze Bell, whom Ed says has been a mentor to his artist son Carson. Often the two men with their similar last names—Mell and Bell—share time at the cabin (just as they once shared a studio), where they bond with their sons, Carson and Tommy, beneath a neon sign of what was once the state’s largest selling beer, Arizona Brewing Company’s flagship brand, A-1.
Similar local heritage touches, like the Pilsner sign, found throughout Mell’s cabin unpretentiously reveal his appreciation of his home state. He’s not an artist who has run away from home, but one who rather embraces it.
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